[Nokinside]

Computer engineer != programmer.

1. Computer engineer is someone who knows computer science. Acquires knowledge that survives when tools die. Hired by Google and other firms.

2. Programmer. Blue collar worker writing bean counting programs. Mainly writes customer software for order. Gets shit done. Becomes difficult to employ when he turns 40 if the shit he does is outdated.

[tensor]

Google and the majority of silicon valley grossly abuse the term software engineer (which is what you describe). There are very few software engineers at google, mostly just developers, many of whom are actually PhDs, which is also not an engineer.

Engineering is about process and responsibility. A professional engineer is often a protected term, and comes with a certain legal authority to approve designs as sound and correct. The purpose of this is to give people a reasonably reliable way to ensure that the people they go to for engineering designs meet a minimum level of professional knowledge. AFAIK in some cases the engineer can be held liable if their design fails causing death.

Can you imagine if developers had to take on some liability by legally and officially "approving" that a software design meets some criteria of being "free from error"? It's almost crazy to consider it, though you can imagine that such a thing would actually be pretty important for say, medical equipment software, or aircraft control software. Unfortunately this is pretty far from the reality of software engineering.

Unlike other forms of engineering, there is no such thing as a "professional software engineer", though you can get a degree in the _topic_ of software engineering.

TLDR there are no "software engineers" in the same sense that you have electrical or mechanical engineers. The protection on the term engineer in software is commonly contested, though perhaps less so in the US then elsewhere.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

I agree with you that "Software Engineer" is often used pretentiously. Supposedly a lot of North American companies advertise "Software Engineers" because the job category "engineer" is mentioned in the NAFTA treaty (i.e. it's easier to hire people that way).

[EduardoBautista]

Funny, in Canada they appear to do the exact opposite because engineering jobs are regulated. So instead of "software engineers" it's more common to find "software developers".

[TheCoelacanth]

Most electrical and mechanical engineers aren't Professional Engineers either. A Professional Engineer's sign off is only needed on safety critical projects, so most don't bother with it because they don't work on safety critical projects.

[DaiPlusPlus]

A "computer engineer" is someone who designs microprocessors and physical computational hardware - not software. (And for the laity, it is not someone who fixes your broken desktop PC either).

Even if you meant SE instead of CE, I feel your distinction is arbitrary and almost classist - while it's true that the top notch folks hired by Google and Microsoft could write "bean counting programs" its fallacious to assume the contrarywise - major accounting and business software firms are just as picky when it comes to hiring - similarly I know plenty of small startups writing exotic software that are able to ship without needing to hire everyone from MIT an Stanford - I also know plenty of very intelligent and capable minds going to waste at companies like Google, MSFT and Facebook working on projects they dislike or for low-impact internal systems - while their contemporaries who went to a coding boot camp got picked up by Snapitterbook and become hot stuff despite never having read the Mythical Man-Month.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Computer Engineer != computer scientist.

1. Computer engineer works at and around the boundary between electrical engineering and computer science. Hardware, firmware, drivers, and other low-level systems that interact closely with the physical world. Hired by Intel and other firms.

2. Computer scientist knows the study of computation. Computer science tends to abstract the hardware away and consider ideal systems.

There is of course some overlap. Computer engineering is all about the overlap between CS and EE, so some CS people will work in some of the same areas as CEs. Likewise with EEs. And the terms are fuzzy, and may have different definitions to different people, but the distinction I made seems to be present in most college degree programs I've seen.

[ChemicalWarfare]

Assuming you meant "Software Engineer" not "Computer Engineer".

>> Acquires knowledge that survives when tools die

I would actually agree with this, the kicker is though this "acquired knowledge" is not CS knowledge - it's understanding of how to get shit done in the "real world" and is not something you can easily acquire by reading a CS book.

[stale2002]

No, programmers get paid 6 figure salaries to work at top tech companies in the bay area.

Also,the "computer science" stuff that is asked in Google-style interviews is vastly overstated in terms of difficulty.

The interview stuff can be learned by most any programmer, in a couple months of intensive self study, involving going through practice problems in Cracking the Code Interview. You don't have to be a genius to do that. It is mostly just repetition and pattern matching.

I went through Google's process recently, and every single algorithm question that I was asked, was a problem that I had studied/seen in advance, word for word.

It turns out that there are only a pool of a couple hundred (thats a high estimate actually) algorithms questions that most interviewers will ask you, and if you've studied all X hundred of them, then you are good to go. No PHD or CS degree required.