[QuantumNomad_]

I’ve had jobs where my title was “software engineer”, but I never refer to myself as such outside of work. When I tell others what I do, I say I am a software developer. It may seem a pointless distinction, but to me there is a distinction.

Neither myself nor the vast majority of other “software engineers” in our field are living up to what it should mean to be an “engineer”.

The people that make bridges and buildings, those are the engineers. Software engineers, for the very very most part, are not.

[brightball]

I was won over by this distinction from another senior some years ago. I think he said…

“Developers build things. Engineers build them and keep them running.”

I like the linguistic point from a standpoint of emphasizing a long term responsibility.

[chermi]

I was just reading "how the world became rich" and they made an interesting distinction economic "development" vs plain "growth". Amusingly, "development" to them means exactly what you're saying "engineer" should mean. It's sustainable, structural, not ephemeral. Development in the abstract hints at foundational work. Building something up to last. It seems like this meaning degradation is common in software. It still blows my mind how the "full-stack" naming stuck, for example.

https://www.howtheworldbecamerich.com/

Edit-on a related note, are there any studies on the all-in long-term cost between companies that "develop" vs. "engineer". I doubt there would be clean data since the managers that ignored all of the warning of "tech debt" would probably have the say on both compiling and releasing such data.

Does the cost of "tech-debt" decrease as the cost of "coding" decreased or is there a phase transition on the quality of the code? I bet there will be an inflection point if you plotted the adoption time of AI coding by companies. Late adapters that timed it after the models and harnesses and practices were good enough (probably still some time in the near future) would have less all-in cost per same codebase quality.

[lesam]

When your bridge falls down, you don't call an incident and ask your engineer to fix it, you sue them.

In software there's a lot more emphasis on post-hoc fixes rather than up front validation, in my experience.

[yomismoaqui]

I like this one from Russ Cox:

"Software engineering is what happens to programming when you add time and other programmers."

[ge96]

I'm similar except for me reason is no degree. So some jobs eng others just developer... although my current job I'm a "technology specialist" which is funny. But I'm getting paid so whatever.

Most recently I wrote cloudformation templates to bring up infra for AWS-based agents. I don't use ai-assisted coding except googling which I acknowledge is an ai summary.

A friend of mine is in a toxic company where everyone has to use AI and they're looked down upon if they don't use it. Every minute of their day has to be logged doing something. They're also going to lay off a bunch of people soon since "AI has replaced them" this is in the context of an agency.