[FredPret]

The same can be said for dentists or architects or chemical engineers or whatever. Teeth and houses and oil refineries are “solved” problems in that we know how to do it.

But each instance is a little different. Each customer wants their flavour of the problem solved.

Long story short: don’t get into a line of work if you don’t like churning out multiples of the same thing for years.

[WorldMaker]

> The same can be said for dentists or architects or chemical engineers or whatever.

- Dentists have dental hygienists that do the day-to-day grunt work so that dentists can focus on the real problems/exceptional cases (cavities, root canals, etc).

- Architects build the plans, but they leave it to construction workers to actually construct the project.

- Chemical engineers generally work with staffs of chemists and other roles that the take the engineered solution and apply it day-to-day.

Right now, software uses the same job titles "for everything". There's (perhaps intentionally) no differentiation between the people expected to solve the hard problems/engineer the tough solutions and the people hired to plug-and-chug their way through their 15th yet-another-CRUD-app that year. There are complaints in the surrounding threads even that some of the "drone work" pays better salaries and has better hours/corporate cultures than the harder stuff. It's an interesting "upside down" situation compared to even just the three fields specifically referenced here.

I went to an engineering school with the expectation that I would be doing software engineering not just in name but in role, but most of the jobs I've ever worked were paying me to do not that. I certainly know friends who are chemical engineers that also perform the role of chemists for their companies, but those are clearly distinct enough job descriptions with a big enough salary distance that those companies know that any hours my friends put in as chemists rather than their hired job is over-paying those hour rates by a considerable enough amount that they have reason to hire cheaper chemists. I have never seen a software job consider that they may be hugely over-paying a software engineer to do "software development grunt work". Without truly separate job titles and salary considerations that is forever going to be opaque to the accountants at companies.

Long story short: other professions clearly delineate between jobs that are (creative) problem solving and jobs that are more "grunt work" like Ikea-assembling CRUD apps. Why don't we?

[ZephyrBlu]

> Long story short: other professions clearly delineate between jobs that are (creative) problem solving and jobs that are more "grunt work" like Ikea-assembling CRUD apps. Why don't we?

Is that even possible? It's difficult to separate grunt work and problem solving, because you often need similar levels of context to solve both. They also tend to intertwine a lot.

[WorldMaker]

Of course it is possible. There's just currently more reasons for companies not to care and not to do it than to do it: Capital P Professions have education requirements and licensing/certification commitments. Capital P Professions have ethics bodies and mandate professional standards. Capital P Professions have professional societies that sometimes can organize industry wide negotiations (not quite to the same extent as Unions, but kin to it).

I don't think it is a technical problem keeping software from better sorting its various types of jobs by difficulty and types of problem solving. I think it's far more corporate politics and sociopolitics and a general lazy preference for the current status quo (because it works to company's favors in terms of job description opacity and keeping pay scales confused and under-valued and, uh, not having to worry about "quaint" "old timey" things like professional ethics investigations).

[pjmlp]

Software Engineering is also a capital P profession on the countries where it is a professional title, and not something that one is allowed to call themselves after a six weeks bootcamp.