I like the distinction between technician and engineering. So much of software development is just technician work and has nothing at all to do with engineering.
Unlike other countries in the US you can call yourself an engineer as a job description without any restrictions, so far too many people have taken on that job description, even if it does not make any sense.
≥≥ Unlike other countries in the US you can call yourself an engineer as a job description without any restrictions, so far too many people have taken on that job description, even if it does not make any sense.
This is one of my pet peeves... in Engineering school it is beaten into you that what you build has to be correct. Correct as in, did you check the poles and zeros? Is this thing going to oscillate out of control and kill people in any breeze? Is this circuit ever going to go into a region where it will fail, probably killing people, and did you ensure you have circuitry that will prevent that? Is every floor of this building rated for the loads, winds, seismic activity, etc.
I feel like in software, there used to be a lot of focus on correctness of algorithms. In undergrad computer engineering we had to take algorithms and again in grad school. That class seemed like the one to teach you to be correct, but it was just in your algorithm design. So much of software today controls hardware that may end up controlling (insert your deadly item here: life support, airplanes, cars, trains, critical infrastructure, deadly infrastructure, etc) that it makes me wonder just how much holistic testing of the "in which ways can this software fail and kill people" has taken place.
>So much of software today controls hardware that may end up controlling (insert your deadly item here: life support, airplanes, cars, trains, critical infrastructure, deadly infrastructure, etc) that it makes me wonder just how much holistic testing of the "in which ways can this software fail and kill people" has taken place.
For aerospace software specifically, a lot. Embedded Software Developers also are often people who also are Electrical engineers and understand how to do proper engineering of a system. In aerospace you have very specific guidelines on how software is developed and tested and which tells you what you need to consider during/before/after the development process. As is common in engineering the "doing" part (e.g. writing the software) is the least relevant part.
If anything this feels like an exception that proves the rule.
I'd wager 60% of software engineers work on teams where they have an existing product, add a feature, and then when done go add a new feature. A sizable % of this folks so have other teams working on other parts of the same codebase. Development is incremental, with no long-term vision, and certainly none of the hard metrics for success.
Speaking to the parent, we had a couple weeks of engineering ethics in our computer engineering undergrad. The dude railed on software for having defects, for being at a crisis point, and I threw back super hard & continue to think that most of the field has to face down enormous combinatorial complexity of inputs. And we have to work against moving target codebases where our added work is typically dwarfed by existing complexity. And unlike a bridge or a floor, there is very little opportunity to overbuild against specifications. We can't shoot for 130% of expected load (in most circumstances), it works until it doesn't.
Thankfully I feel like most mission-critical devices tend to have more limited missions, aren't so open ended, but most software development feels more like an ongoing effort to keep iterating and adding than an cross-the-finish-line effort. Every sprint should be at least one release right? How do we get such high assurances in such regular repeated development cycles?
Hillel Wayne wrote an excellent series of articles on whether software was "engineering" that included interviewing traditional engineers that were now in software [0]. I strongly recommend it.
For me, I sit next to EEs and MechEs all day working on safety critical systems. There are some differences in our jobs, but frankly I don't see the substantive differences that would make one or two of those non-engineering compared to the others.
It's also worth noting that an engineering degree does not make a person an engineer any more than a JD makes someone a lawyer or a beauty school diploma makes someone a hair stylist.
Except we allow people to call themselves engineers without having professional accreditation.
> Except we allow people to call themselves engineers without having professional accreditation.
Naturally. We allow people to practice engineering without professional accreditation. It would be completely nonsensical to prevent someone from being able to state literally what they do. Some specific engineering areas (those most likely to cause human harm) may be more discriminating with respect to who is allowed to do the work, but with respect to engineering in general it is open season. Anyone with the will is free to do it.
We don't (at least with some assumptions about jurisdiction) allow people to practice law or hair styling without professional accreditation. Anyone claiming to be those things without the professional accreditation is lying, so there is at least some logic in trying to stop people from lying. But not so is the case for engineer. Not having professional accreditation does not imply the same.
Except in my country we do prevent engineers from calling themselves engineers unless they have professional accreditation, even though we quite happily allow engineers to practice engineering without professional accreditation. It's the stupidest thing.
Usually software is easier to take apart and modify than other engineering products, so it doesn’t make sense to hold it to the same standard of correctness, and prioritize speed of deployment more.
>Usually software is easier to take apart and modify than other engineering products,
I do not think that is true. The one thing software allows is a large degree of modularity. In Electrical or mechanical engineering everything can always influence everything else. In software you can have very strong boundaries.
>so it doesn’t make sense to hold it to the same standard of correctness, and prioritize speed of deployment more.
I think this is debatable, but I understand where you’re coming from.
Personally I think it would be a better world if software were held to the same standards as other engineering disciplines, and we didn’t treat it as somehow less important for software to be correct just because it’s easy to fix. Things would move slower, but we wouldn’t be “spinning our wheels” nearly as much by redoing work and reinventing wheels over and over. A world where software can be considered “done” when it works and is free of bugs sounds amazing to me.
I see so many mechanical bugs in my farm equipment, I have to question your notion that other engineering disciplines are actually held to a higher standard.
According to the dictionary, engineer is defined as: A person who designs, builds, or maintains engines, machines, or public works.
You may have a point that the prevailing idea of what engineering is does not recognize software as an engineering discipline as it does not fit into any of engines, machines, or public works. But if we were to include software, surely all software practitioners are people who design, build, or maintain software? Even the web API guy from the story is an engineer on that end.
You are totally misunderstanding me. I am not saying that software engineering does not exist, but that most people who are software developers are not software engineers.
If you look at what engineers are doing in other disciplines you will find that in software there are some people doing the same thing. They are doing things like drafting requirements, designing, defining, simulating, overseeing, but don't spend much, if any, time actually building things.
> They are doing things like drafting requirements, designing, defining, simulating
Which is design; captured in the definition.
You're welcome to invent whatever meaning for engineering you want (although you kind of need to define it, in that case – we can't read your mind), but going by what most people consider engineering to be, either all software developers are engineers or none of them are.
>either all software developers are engineers or none of them are.
Why? I have worked jobs where I definitely didn't do any real design and was just there to implement certain things. I absolutely wouldn't call what I did engineering.
>What is the significance of you not wanting to call it engineering?
It conflates two separate things with not a great amount of overlap. It also describes two different paths, an academic path and a tradesman path. The distinction is obviously useful in describing people/roles/activities.
You could also ask why we are conflating machinists with engineers, clearly machinists are building things, definitely more so than engineers.
> You could also ask why we are conflating machinists with engineers
You could, but it would be rather silly as machinist is clearly a subset of engineer (within what most people deem engineer to mean). It is not a conflation, it is a more precise term. Like using "surgeon" over "physician". It is not like a surgeon has anything to do with your family doctor evaluating your common cold symptoms. Those are entirely different jobs too, yet absolutely get grouped together.
The problem here, it seems, is that we've never come up with generally accepted terms to differentiate the different roles under the software engineering umbrella. I expect that is because the differentiation doesn't matter beyond trying to appeal to some pointless emotions.
> Engineering is distinguished by being an academic career.
I expect you mean that Professional Engineer (PE) is distinguished as being a member of a certain professional organization (or groups of organizations). Indeed, that is true. Has little to do with the topic at hand, though.
I'm not familiar with any differentiation by academic career, unless you are thinking of "Professor of Engineering", or something along those lines? But "professor" seems to be the operative word there.
What about the definition of engineer even suggests academics? It is, in my mind, decidedly pointed to practitioners. It literally states "design, build, or maintain". Those are decidedly not academic pursuits.
Where I live you can not call yourself an "engineer" at all without a specific university degree.
It is pointless to discuss here, if you do not see the value in distinguishing the career of learning a trade and a getting a degree, I won't convince you otherwise. Obviously the rest of the world doesn't consider a bricklayer an engineer, just because he is building something and wouldn't want to conflate the civil engineer responsible for that building with the profession of brick laying.
> Where I live you can not call yourself an "engineer" at all without a specific university degree.
Same here, but we're still going to call other people engineers because usurping a term already found in the common lexicon and trying to hold it legally hostage is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. The existence of a law does not imply sound reasoning.
> if you do not see the value in distinguishing the career of learning a trade and a getting a degree, I won't convince you otherwise.
If there was such benefit, professional engineering organizations would serve no purpose. In reality, it's the professional organization that brings benefit. After all, you can't take someone's degree away. But you can remove them from being a professional member when they don't abide by the "engineering code", which is where the actual benefit lies.
But if you want to call attention to the degree you hold for whatever arbitrary reason, why not simply say "I have a degree"? Why would "engineer" need to say the same thing? In reality nobody is going to care anyway (they might care if you are a member of a PE organization, though), but if they did for some bizarre reason, they're going to want to see proof, so your word doesn't matter anyway. There is good reason the prevailing definition of engineer does not imply anything of the sort.
We do distinguish them. You literally just demonstrated it! "Brick layer" draws a clear distinction from the "architect" who designed the building, as well as the "janitor" who maintains the building afterwards. Throw those terms out to a random person on the street and they're bound to have a pretty good idea what you mean in that differentiation. The differentiation is helpful! That is why we have created words to call attention to the differentiation found in different engineering roles, just like we do for physicians, and every other broad career category out there.
But, as least as far as I know (and nobody seems to have anything to suggest otherwise), we've never done the same within different software engineering specialities. The only thing that I've ever seen that might come close is "software architect", but despite working in the industry I honestly have no idea what that actually means. The people who claim that title don't seem to do anything different than anyone else. Without a "software brick layer", what could it even begin to mean? Whatever it means, I'm certain the average person on the street will have no clue as to what a "software architect" is and how it differs from anyone else working on software.
As such, what I suggested is that within the software discipline we've never reached generally accepted terms to spell out that differentiation because it doesn't matter in software. We get a few people here and there with bizarre emotional attachments to different jobs that wish there was differentiation (what I suspect is the source of "software architect"), but that does not make for a practical reason to actually put in the effort on a population scale.
Sure, perhaps it will start to matter as the field evolves. Software is still quite young in the grand scheme of things. The differentiation between brick layer and architect in the early days of building construction was no doubt equally useless; only becoming useful as the profession grew up. And, indeed, when that time comes we'll have little choice but to start to settle on words to describe different software development jobs, but until then...
I think "engineer" as a protected title refers more to their status as a professional in the strict sense of the word.
If you are a professional, the norms of your profession override your loyalty to your employer. Your boss cannot override your professional judgment, unless they are also a member of the same profession and willing to assume responsibility. And if something goes wrong, it can be the professional who will be held liable rather than the boss.
I think there is a distinction in general. On the other hand, as someone with degrees in other areas of engineering, I also think there can be too much emphasis placed on the degree to which those other areas of engineering apply formal process and rigorous practices to everything they do. Yes, there are established codes for structural analysis and the like but there's still also a lot of seat of the pants.
Unlike other countries in the US you can call yourself an engineer as a job description without any restrictions, so far too many people have taken on that job description, even if it does not make any sense.