[liketochill]

Engineering is about the application of science, about safeguarding the public welfare, the duty owed to your clients, and through liability standing behind the work that an engineer does. The modern software industry doesn’t fit that pattern, eula’s shirk all responsibility and dark patterns are applied to trick users.

Until people writing software are taking ethics courses and are part of a professional organization to which they are accountable for being held to some code, there is no software engineering.

[test_epsilon]

You didn't really address what I wrote though.

And I disagree, it does fit the pattern which is what my whole rant was about. You seem to have a romanticized idea of what "real" engineers do as well. A _lot_ of it involves software, a lot of it is prototyping and finding bugs and hacking around them and refining.

If you don't like the digital electrical engineering because it's too close to software for you, try mechanical engineering in automobiles. If you've spent much time around cars, you'll know that they have a lot of quirks like this where it's obvious a problem has been found and fixed. For example an engine of a particular vintage might be known to be prone to head cracking, then a few years later they might come out with another engine with a lot of the same part numbers but revised head design or material.

The engineers who designed it were not gazing at idealized otto cycle equations or out polling the public about its welfare, and the company behind it was doing its level best to play down the problem and coming up with ways their dealers could try to nurse cars through their warranty periods.

[liketochill]

But there is a warranty.

I think what a lot of computer programming goes on by people who call themselves software engineers but don’t follow engineering methods and ethics, such as prototyping, and having warranties and liability for the work.

I have known some old school engineers who were inspiring in their depth of knowledge, ability to do research and solve new problems, and management of customer and employee relationships, and definitely that has colored my view of what a professional engineer should be.

[test_epsilon]

So even if we ignore for a minute that software can have warranties... having a warranty? Really? That's what you're going try to say means software development is not an engineering discipline? You could have just accepted my arguments with some grace. You don't expect me to dignify this with a response surely.

[liketochill]

As an end user of software I don’t have SLAs or warranties, just EULAs that guarantee nothing and the ground constantly shifting underneath me with updates that take away features or turn me in to a subscription revenue stream as some functionality is unnecessarily moved to the cloud.

I am sure there is software created by an engineering process by software engineers, but it is probably less visible to me in my day to day computing. The effort you detailed that is required to make sure a chip works is a good one.

And I agree electrical and computer engineering are disciplines.