People obsessed with protecting the term “engineer” are usually those who want to gatekeep their jobs and salary. In other words, they are worried about competition and want to keep the career “prestigious” and kick the ladder away.
Software Engineer and Software Developer are used interchangeably for the most part and I don't think you can really get any meaningful distinction just by the name (in most countries at least).
Some countries (Canada I think being one?) may require you be licensed/registered with an engineering body before you're allowed to call yourself an engineer, but thats not the case in most countries AFAIK
Indeed. I worked at a Canadian company that got a legal nastygram from the professional association saying to stop calling us engineers.
Then I started working for an American company that was like shrug no laws against that.
I just can’t say professional engineer.
The whole thing makes a ton of sense when we’re building bridges or airplane safety rated computer systems, but not so much when building websites or whatnot.
I work on critical software and have the 'engineer' label, but do have a nagging feeling it's less structured than 'normal' engineering disciplines. I'm taking a part-time BEng to see if that's the case though!
I've worked with a bunch of engineers, and while I respect and admire them tremendously, I'd not want to be lumped in with the kind of code they generally write. And don't get me started on the typical code a scientist writes!
Let the downvotes commence.
Edit: This is a gentle ribbing, but there really does seem to be a different approach in the philosophy of how to solve a problem. Engineers seem to eschew abstraction while software folks embrace is (sometimes to a fault). It's actually pretty fascinating.
If they wanted to built their own abstractions they’d be scientists.
Actually this is one thing that has always confused me about “software engineers,” at least as someone with an engineering education who isn’t doing engineering work really: we learned how to do particular types of problems very well and reliably, and generally learned a bunch of math tricks. But at a fundamental level the material that the physics students were learning was basically more complicated. Scientist has always felt like a more prestigious title to me. Since most programmers have computer science degrees, why don’t we call ourselves computer scientists?
> Since most programmers have computer science degrees, why don’t we call ourselves computer scientists?
Because they aren’t doing scientific research, they are applying the products of such research to design (and build; with software the distinction is less significant than with many physical items) products, so its somewhere between architecture/engineering and constructiom, rather than science.
Very odd. Usually engineers love abstraction where I am coming from. The simpler the solution, better it usually is.
Helps understanding the whole system, making it less complex. Simplicity causes less bugs.
Software engineering is a branch of engineering in many countries. Engineering follows the engineering design process [1] and uses applied science. So, to me, people doing software engineering (regardless of laws / licenses) are following an approximation of the engineering design process. A software developer is anyone getting paid to write or produce software regardless of approach or knowledge of CS topics.
On a spectrum, there are software developers that follow the engineering design process and use all sorts of knowledge of applied science, but there are also those who make it all up as they go along and rediscover or rename concepts independently. Each approach comes with its own associated benefits and tradeoffs, and there are times and places where the latter end of the spectrum can be desirable.
Just my own idiolect but I see SREs and the related competencies and practices as software engineers, whereas I see "programmers" as more of a creative endeavour and "developer" as on the spectrum between programmer and SRE
This only opinion piece on the issue worth reading, because it's the only one that bothered to seek the opinions of the people that would know best: those people that have been software engineers _and_ some other kind of engineer.
I think I'm missing something, but why is an opinion piece needed on this issue? Software engineering is a licensed engineering profession in many places. It used to be possible to be licensed as a software engineering in the United States [1, 2](little demand caused the licensing exams to be discontinued, possibly because regulation wasn't enforced, according to [2]). So, I think it's fair to say enough of the engineering profession has spoken to say software is a branch of engineering.
What I think are the relevant extracts from the article:
> “Do you consider software engineering actually engineering?”
> Of the 17 crossovers I talked to, 15 said yes.
> That said, many of the crossovers [3] also added an additional qualification: software engineering is real engineering, but a lot of people who write software aren’t doing software engineering. This is not a problem with them, rather a problem with our field: we don’t have a rich enough vocabulary to talk about what these developers do.
The engineering field has developed a vocabulary for different professionals in the field. Why can't this be applied to the software field since it is a form of engineering? There are engineers, technologists, technicians, and trades (at least where I am). The issue is there are education and work experience requirements that lead to licensing, which people will say are inequitable and gatekeeping [4]. From 2, there was an experience-only path available to get software engineering licensure, so if the field really wants it, there seems to be precedent to allow for alternative routes into those titles.
[3] The definition of "crossovers:" "people who used to be professional engineers and then became professional software developers. I call these people crossovers, hybrids between the two worlds."
[4] I'm sympathetic to these concerns. I studied engineering technology and worked as a technologist at the beginning of my career. I wanted to become a mechanical engineer, but I couldn't afford to return to school full time to complete the remaining 2 years for the BEng. (My school offered a 2 year diploma for engineering technologists, which led directly to years 3 and 4 year of the BEng.) When I wanted to complete the degree, a full time course load was required (7 courses per term at my school) for the engineering program to maintain accreditation.
If you do any sort of measurement, analysis, or design before implementing a system, you're leveraging engineering principles.
Examples: measuring data scale for growth rate and future needs, calculating incremental costs of cloud instances and data stores, designing and proving a state machine, instrumenting systems, measuring and stress testing a system against load, understanding back pressure and dynamical behaviors of distributed systems, designing threaded or active/active systems, vector clocks, consensus algoritms, test suites, etc. etc.
I've had to write short inductive proofs in several of the systems I've built.
It's engineering. The sooner we get over the imposter syndrome debate of what we can and cannot call ourselves and embrace the full scope and possibilty of what we can achieve, the sooner we can become better and more capable software engineers.
This is pretty common in the Blockchain space to verify transactions behave correctly when arriving out of sync with tools like Agda, Coq, etc... I assume it's the same on databases & I heard Leslie Lamport give a talk at work where he mentioned AWS used TLA+ to prove some of its properties.
The UK does, you can get chartered engineer status with a BSc & MSc in Software Engineering or Computer Science if it's applied enough with the IET. When I looked at the US i'm 99% sure I found similar degrees in Software Engineering too.
Fwiw, I have. They're becoming more common - and probably a good thing too, covering important non-CS skills like requirements engineering that are mostly made up in small tech companies without that experience.