Computer science vs software engineering?

Software engineering is all about people. You have to communicate with the business, realizing their needs, figuring out their processes, optimizing them, all this before the first line of code is written. Then, you have to manage your direct reports, and if you have none, write code with people in mind, people who will read it after you. As they say, code is for people, not for computers. Then, you have to improve the app listening to users, again, people.

I can’t assign a software engineer a role higher than middle if they’re bad with people.

If you wanna do cool stuff with computers and be a misanthrope, do computer science! It’s a very prestigious field where you are left alone with scary math and fundamental concepts. If you’re successful there, you’ll have a mad asocial scientist card, and no one will ever insist to you that people is important. They will just accept that they shouldn’t annoy you, and you are “allowed” to yell at them because you’re “special” and a “genius”. You can hate them 24/7.

Waaaay too many but let's go with this one for now.

At my previous job there was a web application which was generating about 1gb of log data a second. Server was full and the 'fullstack engineers' we called had zero clue about backend stuff and couldn't fix it.

Me and another engineer worked our asses off to figure this out but eventually the logging stopped and it went back to normal.

Great, right?

For that moment. I was the on-call server engineer and at like 3am I got called awake because this shit was happening again.
Sleep drunk with my phone I ssh'd into the server, not sure about what to do at first but then suddenly: let's chattr the goddamn log file...

$ chattr +i /var/log/logfile

Bam, worked, done, back to sleep.

(this comment + param marks the file in a way that it can only be read until the mark is removed, so you can't write to it or move it or remove it or whatever)