Old, but fun read that argues that today’s programmers are not like typical Engineers and shouldn’t really call themselves that as Engineering requires certification, is subject to government regulation, bear a burden to the public, etc.
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Tech bros have ruined the prestige of a lot of titles. Software “Engineer”, Systems “Architect”, Data “Scientist”, Computer “Wizard”, etc.
It’s not just tech bros, it’s the whole approach - weird names, version numbers turning into marketing tool instead of just numbers, attempts to hype up things that shouldn’t be hyped up.
When I was a kid in Russia in year 2003 (suppose), it was associated with everything Chinese. But then Windows Vista and iPhone and what not … came into normality. And now everything, not just toys produced in China, is something made of plastic and intended to break next day and be unfixable.
I’m torn between two things - one is to accept life as it is, because that’s truth, and another is that in future of my dreams we’d have good, reliable things, their price and availability helped by scientific and industrial development.
I guess what one can wish is for the developing world to finally develop in all its parts sufficiently to make the current paradigm of a few manufacturing countries making everything for the rest of the world, but using IP of a few designing countries, unworkable.
Decentralization and competitiveness help everyone.
I think IP and patent laws have been a tool to create stagnation. You won’t make Spectrum-like machines for kids in school, when you can have something from the Intel+AMD/ARM-ASML-TSMC ecosystem. And if you don’t accept US and EU and in general European world’s IP and patent laws, you’ll get practically embargoed. And those are close to legalized monopoly. And without breaking a lot of patents, even trying to build a competition to ASML and TSMC in like 40 years is going to be a few orders of magnitude less possible than with breaking them (still not very likely).
So what I’m trying to say - Speccy is probably not something to aim for now, it’s not problematic, just no demand. But aiming for something like Sun equipment of year 1997 would be a good idea. If hardware of that level were produced on scale in a few bigger countries, like Brazil or India or even China, it would make a lot of difference. I know China has Loongson. On scale.
And job listings, I had a longshot hope of getting into product development/product design. But 99.8% of job listings using those terms are for code monkeys.
I prefer the term code wizard.
It’s like the term “social scientist”. People always like to quibble, but eh… whatever…
There is a difference between computer programmer and software engineers.
Ah, by the way, Edsger W Dijkstra referred to himself as a programmer. Good times.
I know this is from 2015, but even then, it was a bit late to make this argument. This was already mainstream enough in the 90s to be the punchline in syndicated comic strips. By 2015, we already had “customer experience engineers” (i.e. tier-1 helpdesk). The ship has not only sailed, it has sunk.
Anyway, the phrase originated in an era when programming was very different from what it is today, when most programmers came from a background in electrical engineering or something along those lines.
No, go engineer yourself
Meh. I don’t care. I’m a mechanical engineer by education. While I’ve used it in many jobs, none in a way that requires certification.
In the US, certification is needed in civil engineering and only small subsets of mechanical and electrical engineering. I’ve worked with many engineers who don’t even have a university degree in engineering. I’m not precious about other people calling themselves engineers.
Except for that stretch of time when hotels were trying to hire janitors as “custodial engineers” and offering like $10/hr. Eff that noise. That made an already deteriorating job search experience on LinkedIn worthless.
Yeah I was gonna ask, whether certification/government regulations are required for all engineering disciplines. I graduated with a CS degree and work as a software engineer now. I have family members who studied different engineering disciplines (industrial, civil, mechanical, etc), and only 1 of them ever needed certification (civil engineer). What makes one more “engineering” than others?
In the US, there aren’t as many certification requirements. In civilized countries, “engineer” is a protected professional title like doctors and others, and you have to have your PE cert to say you’re an engineer.
Given the general quality of software, I think it would be a good thing to make it a protected title in the US too.
I live in Australia, which I guess is not a civilized country.
In any case, what does that even mean for software engineers to be certified? Do we get certifications for specific programming language? Or a stack? Or is it specific to what industry your tech is based on? Cos I don’t think it makes sense for someone working on a social media platform to have the same certification as someone who’s working on health tech for example. Why does it need to be a protected title? Does the general public even care or is it just other certified engineers who care?
There is a professional engineer title in the U.S. top and misrepresentating your self is illegal. However since software engineer isn’t a real type of engineering it doesnt get covered. It’s like how a medical doctor is a protected term but if you misrepresent your self as a PhD that’s not protected
I think software is still engineered.
Perhaps as a compromise, non-software engineers could call themselves hardware engineers, or hard engineers for short.
Should bridge that gap in terminology. And ofc assumption should be “engineer” means “hard engineer” and software engineers should always specify they’re software engineers and not call themselves just engineers.
If they didn’t make you put a ring on it, you’re not an engineer. Simple as.
Not a simplistic definition at all…
Make me
You should stop calling yourself an engineer unless you drive a train
I don’t control the job title my company gives me.
No one has suggested that you do and it’s a very silly thing to say. Why on earth would we suggest that you control your company’s actions? Did you read OP’s post?
I am an engineer, just not of programming
and the bar is getting lower. Fast iteration, releasing broken, poorly understood, barely maintainable pieces of shit as quickly as one can.
Fucking agile
Wait, not “software engineer”, just “engineer”? That’s definitely bullshit.
Even “software engineer” is a bit sketchy. Should testers start calling themselves “Software doctors”? Lol
Yeah! My job is to triage, diagnose and remedy. Don’t confuse the two!
I’m ambivalent. I don’t really care about titles generally, but at least software engineer clearly isn’t anything else.
That said, while the term software engineer is a lost cause, I wouldn’t be opposed to some comparable, regulated title where the person has to sign off on code bases and is responsible for major flaws. Obviously you wouldn’t use that as a barrier for every piece of code, but as a requirement for handling personal information on a certain scale? (Obviously it would be pointless until you also regulated intentional sharing of information a hell of a lot better, but still.)
No, that’s silly.
They should call themselves “exterminators” since they look for bugs.
But they don’t actually remove the bugs 🤔
Engineer is a protected title in the UK. You can be a software engineer, if you are qualified to be.
Same thing in Ontario. I actually have a Bachelors of Software Engineering, but am not legally allowed to call myself an engineer because I never got certified with the regulatory body.
As a software engineer, I think there are many places where there is a big difference between a SWE and a programmer/developer based around how active you are in designing the architecture and other systems of the software you’re working on.
That being said, this is just gatekeeping for gatekeeping’s sake. Up until COVID, you could be a PE in software engineering, they only stopped it because the field was changing too fast for the tests to keep up.
All the major engineering disciplines do the same basic formulas with different concepts. Fluid flow, mass flow, electrical ‘flow’. Are all the same basic equations. Software engineers don’t need to do that, they are further away from the actual math which is what makes engineering, engineering.
