[mellosouls]

Software engineer has always been a daft, grandiose term that seems aimed at prestige rather than reality in the majority of cases.

If coders can call themselves engineers, no reason why anybody else solving puzzles for a living can't.

[xmcqdpt2]

In my opinion, coding is a craft. As software has only existed for like 70 years, we are more like the guilds building cathedrals in the middle ages than like modern civil engineering.

One day I think there will be true software engineering. When that happens you won't be able to start software projects without certifications, and most people (or programs!) who actually do the coding will be following careful plans and instructions from the engineers who designed the project.

I for one am very happy software isn't fully professionalized yet!

[tough]

> One day I think there will be true software engineering. When that happens you won't be able to start software projects without certifications, and most people (or programs!) who actually do the coding will be following careful plans and instructions from the engineers who designed the project.

Sounds really bad.

Software can't fall on your head and kill you, not all of it at least.

Different software should require different professionals building it.

And it's usually not about the software but about the management telling the engineers to take shortcuts or whatever (Boeing comes to mind)

[jes]

You might enjoy this article on the Therac-25 [1]. It's kind of the standard example of how errors in software can wind up harming people. I have written medical device software for about 30 years. In my experience, delivering high quality software for Class B and Class C devices is both challenging and expensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

[rmilejczz]

Every software developer should know this story, it is a humbling and important lesson. Yes luckily most of can’t ship code that accidentally kills people but we can absolutely empathize with the conditions which led to it happening.

I recommend reading the entire postmortem, http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf yes it is quite long but if you write code in any capacity it’s worth the read

[jes]

Thank you so much for the link to the postmortem. I will be sharing it and discussing it with my colleagues. We are currently working on the embedded software for an AED.

[groestl]

You will need a software engineer to argue in your favor before the court ;)

[groestl]

Don't want to argue against you, since the term is definitely misused for signaling a lot of things, but in a stricter sense, software engineering is not about the puzzle, it's about the whole pipeline surrounding it.

[skwirl]

I’m guessing you aren’t from the US because in the US there is not much prestige in the title of engineer, but it seems to be a title people in Europe get weirdly hung up on. If anything, software engineering positions are more prestigious than most traditional engineering positions here.

[hospitalJail]

I was a real engineer for a decade before switching to programming.

I cannot use the word software engineer, since its nothing like real engineering.

Real engineering was def harder, more math intense, and the stakes were sooo much higher. While many software problems can cause you to lose money, engineering problems can cause you to lose time. Yes it sucks your CAD designer had everything on a 0.05 degree angle and it costs 1M to redo the tool, but it also costs 16 weeks to redo the tool. We'd even offer to pay absurd money, prevent future business, etc... to get the tool done in 8 weeks, but its impossible to get it done faster. Now everything in the company is 8 weeks behind schedule.

Anyway, real engineering was harder, but programming pays soooo much more money. Its a demand thing, not a difficulty thing.

[philovivero]

> While many software problems can cause you to lose money, engineering problems can cause you to lose time.

I'm guessing you were trying to say something else here. I literally cannot think of a single software engineering problem I've ever encountered that didn't cost time. By your definition, then, software engineering is engineering. Your claim and your definitions are at odds with one-another.

Also, you don't directly claim it, but you seem to imply, that software engineering can't have real-world consequences... or something? As another reply points out, sometimes software is in the critical path for things like rockets and airplanes, where mistakes cost lives.

And some people making software for less life-altering systems take their craft just as seriously. Some people think that losing $10M every single second while their software is failing is a big deal.

Are you claiming people who write HFT code, ad arbitrage code, code that powers the front page of Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are just cowboying it through the day, doing nothing special?

Overall I just find this comment very confused. Maybe you could put some thought into what you're trying to say, and say it better?

[SirMaster]

So if you have your PE license and are writing software that controls a commercial airplane system or a spacex rocket, you are not an engineer doing software engineering?

[9659]

From Wikipedia: "A software engineer is a person who applies the engineering design process to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software."

"The engineering design process, also known as the engineering method, is a common series of steps that engineers use in creating functional products and processes. The process is highly iterative - parts of the process often need to be repeated many times before another can be entered - though the part(s) that get iterated and the number of such cycles in any given project may vary.

It is a decision making process (often iterative) in which the basic sciences, mathematics, and engineering sciences are applied to convert resources optimally to meet a stated objective. Among the fundamental elements of the design process are the establishment of objectives and criteria, synthesis, analysis, construction, testing and evaluation.[1]"

It is not dependent on the problem domain, rather on how the work is performed.

[hospitalJail]

Ahh I forgot to put my usual caveat.

Assembly and safety critical C can be considered software engineering.

Anything with abstraction, no.

[SirMaster]

I agree that far too many people call themselves software engineers when they really aren't.

But I just mean to say that software engineering itself is definitely still a real thing and there are many people out there that can and should call themselves software engineers.

[edgyquant]

“Real engineer,” is such an insufferable way to make your point. I guess only civic engineering is “real.” If you don’t like the term software engineer you’d be real mad if you found out about sound stage engineers. Being an engineer isn’t about engineering solutions to business problems; nope it’s having to deal with bureaucratic hurdles that slow you down that makes one an engineer.

[tough]

it's just -soft- engineering bro, get over it.

It's always been a demand thing, not a difficulty thing.

[zaphirplane]

Don’t want to be that person but (tm) Engineer has to mean something other than person doing something.

Knot engineer, floor polishing engineer, water spillage cleanup engineer, tax minimization engineer, heart engineer, bus operating engineer, flower pruning engineer

[kordlessagain]

In essence, programming is an ephemeral art. At its core, our work involves utilizing the electromagnetic field to perform tasks akin to 'thinking.' Without continuous computational processes, our products might as well be inert objects like rocks that simply exist unchanged for millennia.