[supercommand]

Cloud engineer. Network engineer. Software engineer.... I’ve never heard of medstudents calling themselves doctors, why do cs students/grads get a pass?

Up next chefs will be food engineers, tailors will be clothing engineers, and because I changed the oil in my Toyota once, I’m now a Toyota engineer; specializing in fluids.

Words mean literally nothing anymore (ha). Titles in tech are hilarious at almost every level, especially from the outside looking in.

[klodolph]

This argument gets rehashed in HN pretty often. When I just worked in ops or support my job title had the word “technician” in it. When I was designing systems my job title had the word “engineer” in it, even if I also had ops duties. As far as I can tell this is a regional thing, where certain jurisdictions have laws that regulate who can call themselves engineers, just like certain jurisdictions have laws about who can call themselves hairdressers. That doesn’t stop people on HN from thinking that for some reason, we can all agree on a definition for “engineer”, even though we have regular disagreements about the definition about almost every other word in the English language.

“DevOps” is at least ill-defined from the very start, so if we have arguments about what “DevOps” means, at least I can learn something.

[jldugger]

Well, at a certain level it applies. Part of doing my job well involves designing service quality checks. That requires:

1. understanding important engineering principals like queuing theory

2. understanding the system in question well enough to modify it to emit relevant metrics for applying stuff like queuing theory

3. collecting this data into timeseries form

4. applying statistical tests to them, e.g. for normality.

5. deciding between a variety of possible anomaly detection algorithms

Another portion involves capacity planning and datacenter design, which requires a certain amount of electrical engineering knowledge, as well as forecasting. A different part of my job simply involves writing software, testing it, and signing off on changes.

Overall it sounds fairly engineery, even if the powers that be would rather prefer it if the term be reserved those who pass an internship and test (but then refuse to expand said test to include new domains).

[GhettoMaestro]

> tailors will be clothing engineers

Probably going to be ridiculed for this, but "clothing engineer" actually sounds "cool" in a very mature market, in my eyes.