- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
Old, but fun read that argues that today’s programmers are not like typical Engineers and shouldn’t really call themselves that as Engineering requires certification, is subject to government regulation, bear a burden to the public, etc.
You must log in or register to comment.
and the bar is getting lower. Fast iteration, releasing broken, poorly understood, barely maintainable pieces of shit as quickly as one can.
Fucking agile
There is a huge difference between a “programmer” who just codes, and a software engineer, who studied computer science and learned the skills for problem solving as an engineer. The latter is protected in many countries.
Well… I did write an engineering thesis and later got a diploma, so I think I will call myself an engineer.
All this gate keeping is bullshit, but I do have to agree that we are really bad at actually engineering.
I don’t think gate keeping engineering is bullshit, software or otherwise. In fact I think it is one of the few eminently important things to gatekeep.
If computer systems have peoples lives depending on them, having accredited engineers that may be part of a chain of liability for their mistakes is a potentially life saving measure. It provides increased guarantee that someone will be held responsible, be it the firm, or in the case of bankruptcy, the individual engineer.
This provides a significant incentive to only sign off on work that meets all relevant safety criteria.
I’m not sure if that’s how it works in software engineering, but it certainly should.
I am an engineer, just not of programming
Tech bros have ruined the prestige of a lot of titles. Software “Engineer”, Systems “Architect”, Data “Scientist”, Computer “Wizard”, etc.
I prefer the term code wizard.
It’s not just tech bros, it’s the whole approach - weird names, version numbers turning into marketing tool instead of just numbers, attempts to hype up things that shouldn’t be hyped up.
When I was a kid in Russia in year 2003 (suppose), it was associated with everything Chinese. But then Windows Vista and iPhone and what not … came into normality. And now everything, not just toys produced in China, is something made of plastic and intended to break next day and be unfixable.
I’m torn between two things - one is to accept life as it is, because that’s truth, and another is that in future of my dreams we’d have good, reliable things, their price and availability helped by scientific and industrial development.
I guess what one can wish is for the developing world to finally develop in all its parts sufficiently to make the current paradigm of a few manufacturing countries making everything for the rest of the world, but using IP of a few designing countries, unworkable.
Decentralization and competitiveness help everyone.
I think IP and patent laws have been a tool to create stagnation. You won’t make Spectrum-like machines for kids in school, when you can have something from the Intel+AMD/ARM-ASML-TSMC ecosystem. And if you don’t accept US and EU and in general European world’s IP and patent laws, you’ll get practically embargoed. And those are close to legalized monopoly. And without breaking a lot of patents, even trying to build a competition to ASML and TSMC in like 40 years is going to be a few orders of magnitude less possible than with breaking them (still not very likely).
So what I’m trying to say - Speccy is probably not something to aim for now, it’s not problematic, just no demand. But aiming for something like Sun equipment of year 1997 would be a good idea. If hardware of that level were produced on scale in a few bigger countries, like Brazil or India or even China, it would make a lot of difference. I know China has Loongson. On scale.
Meh. I don’t care. I’m a mechanical engineer by education. While I’ve used it in many jobs, none in a way that requires certification.
In the US, certification is needed in civil engineering and only small subsets of mechanical and electrical engineering. I’ve worked with many engineers who don’t even have a university degree in engineering. I’m not precious about other people calling themselves engineers.
Except for that stretch of time when hotels were trying to hire janitors as “custodial engineers” and offering like $10/hr. Eff that noise. That made an already deteriorating job search experience on LinkedIn worthless.
Make me
You should stop calling yourself an engineer unless you drive a train
I call myself an “IT systems engineer”.
In Germany engineer is a regulated term. Computer scientists wanting to call themselves engineer or software engineer need to complete certain higher education programs. A B.Sc. program in CS is enough for example.
Same for the Netherlands.
In my opinion, software engineering has about another 50 years before it matures to the point where it is a “proper” engineering profession.
Wait, not “software engineer”, just “engineer”? That’s definitely bullshit.
Even “software engineer” is a bit sketchy. Should testers start calling themselves “Software doctors”? Lol
No, that’s silly.
They should call themselves “exterminators” since they look for bugs.
There is a big difference between a software engineer and a software developer/programmer. In the same way there is a difference between a civil engineer and a builder.
A software engineer is the one who scopes the project. They define the feasibility, the limitation and exeptions, the tools to use, as well as costing and time planning and management.
The programmers are the ones who work to this scope and utilise the specified tools and technologies to create the product.
I have a degree in software engineering and all of this was covered. From writing scoping documentation, to time and costing with Gantt charts. This is the actual difference.
You’d think that’s how it is but in reality they list software developer roles as software engineer just because they think it sounds better.
