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I think this story does an injustice by calling him an 'engineer'. He cofounded Speedera Networks, which was acquired for $130m by Akamai after a 3-year patent

I think this story does an injustice by calling him an 'engineer'. He cofounded Speedera Networks, which was acquired for $130m by Akamai after a 3-year patent battle, a battle he was on the front-line of and learnt a lot about patent infringement. Yes, he's an engineer, but he's also an engineer who knows more than the average engineer about patents and complex legal argumentation. Source: https://www.wired.com/story/eric-swildens-uber-waymo-lawsuit-patent/ https://www.wired.com/story/eric-swildens-uber-waymo-lawsuit...

true_religion 8y ago
It is not a deservice. Its indicative of how poorly we view our own profession that everyone with other skills must be more than engineer, merely by applying them. A lawyer who becomes mayor is still a lawyer. A doctor who runs a phamacology company is still a doctor. And yes, and engineer who founds a company still retains the core skills and prestige of their hardwon profession. Or at least, I think they should.
- sdenton4 8y ago
  Hardwon profession: Three weeks in a boot camp followed by two years on the bloody frontlines of the Framework Wars...
  - mLuby 8y ago
    I support our troops.
  - true_religion 8y ago
    To be fair, when you become a doctor it is because your peers grant you the title, not merely due to your GPA. Outside the US, engineering is the same. Within the US, there is no formal board for software engineerig but we can at least informally say one is an engineer if other engineers would recognize them as such. I know people whom graduated bootcamps and could qualify as engineers, albiet inexperienced ones, and those who have finished 4 years of schooling but cannot practice engineering. The guy in the article was inducted into the Academy of Science and Engineering at 34. Whether that makes him pretigious or not isn't the question, but there is no doubt in my mind that he is an engineer.
  - InitialLastName 8y ago
    This. It's "engineers" themselves who have degraded the term (once a profession nearly as stringently accredited as doctors or lawyers) by applying it to anyone who can copy/paste stack overflow answers into a text editor.
    - wnoise 8y ago
      It's not the engineers doing that. A software developer is an engineer the same way a janitor is a sanitation engineer.
      - InitialLastName 8y ago
        I have friends in IT who get really angry when I refer to them as computer-janitors.
  - ddalex 8y ago
    In certain Eastern countries, Engineer (capitalized) is a title much like Attorney or Doctor.
- darkerside 8y ago
  It's not a disservice or an injustice, but it does paint a very incomplete picture. Like talking about Harvard lawyer and law professor Barack Obama.

true_religion 8y ago

It is not a deservice. Its indicative of how poorly we view our own profession that everyone with other skills must be more than engineer, merely by applying them. A lawyer who becomes mayor is still a lawyer. A doctor who runs a phamacology company is still a doctor. And yes, and engineer who founds a company still retains the core skills and prestige of their hardwon profession. Or at least, I think they should.

sdenton4 8y ago
Hardwon profession: Three weeks in a boot camp followed by two years on the bloody frontlines of the Framework Wars...
- mLuby 8y ago
  I support our troops.
- true_religion 8y ago
  To be fair, when you become a doctor it is because your peers grant you the title, not merely due to your GPA. Outside the US, engineering is the same. Within the US, there is no formal board for software engineerig but we can at least informally say one is an engineer if other engineers would recognize them as such. I know people whom graduated bootcamps and could qualify as engineers, albiet inexperienced ones, and those who have finished 4 years of schooling but cannot practice engineering. The guy in the article was inducted into the Academy of Science and Engineering at 34. Whether that makes him pretigious or not isn't the question, but there is no doubt in my mind that he is an engineer.
- InitialLastName 8y ago
  This. It's "engineers" themselves who have degraded the term (once a profession nearly as stringently accredited as doctors or lawyers) by applying it to anyone who can copy/paste stack overflow answers into a text editor.
  - wnoise 8y ago
    It's not the engineers doing that. A software developer is an engineer the same way a janitor is a sanitation engineer.
    - InitialLastName 8y ago
      I have friends in IT who get really angry when I refer to them as computer-janitors.
- ddalex 8y ago
  In certain Eastern countries, Engineer (capitalized) is a title much like Attorney or Doctor.
darkerside 8y ago
It's not a disservice or an injustice, but it does paint a very incomplete picture. Like talking about Harvard lawyer and law professor Barack Obama.