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Are We Really Engineers? (2021)

• blondie9x 5y ago
  Doubt it. Mostly we chase TC and forget what actually matters to society and the planet as a whole.
• mrwnmonm 5y ago
  off-topic: if you want to read something interesting about the effects of abstraction, take a look at this https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NS35S76/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NS35S76/ref=dbs_a_def_r...
• drderidder 5y ago
  This may not be a popular comment, but if you have to ask, then no. In Canada at least, engineering is a regulated profession. No one can legally call themselves an engineer without a four-year Bachelor of Engineering degree from an accredited University and membership in the professional engineering body of the Province in which they practice. Doctors and lawyers are other regulated professions; one cannot simply call themselves a doctor, lawyer or engineer.
• MaxBarraclough 5y ago
  > we actually use discrete math, where we deal exclusively with non-continuous numbers. This includes things like graph theory, logic, and combinatorics. You might not realize that you are using these, but you do. They’re just so internalized in software that we don’t see them as math! I strongly disagree with this level of charity. That's like saying every cyclist is a physicist. Someone who takes a short programming course might not even have heard the term discrete mathematics, and almost certainly won't be qualified to develop a proof of correctness for an algorithm, i.e. to actually do discrete mathematics in a serious sense. > most of computer science is viewable as a branch of mathematics And yet there's a world of difference between a computer scientists and the average software developer. > Every time you simplify a conditional or work through the performance complexity of an algorithm, you are using math. Just because there are no integrals doesn’t mean we are mathless. But the absence of doing math surely does make someone (or some line of work) mathless. Most software developers go their whole careers doing no serious math. > Just because we use a different branch of math doesn’t mean we’re not doing engineering. Perhaps the argument can be made that engineering doesn't necessarily have to include math, but this isn't the way to make it. Again, the average developer does not know any mathematical field in any real depth. This is in sharp contrast to, say, aeronautical engineers. > Whether or not we are engineers is irrelevant to whether or not we are good engineers. Disagree. If the term engineer has any meaning, it has to indicate some level of competence. The bar has to be set somewhere. We all agree that changing a car tyre does not qualify someone as any sort of engineer. Is it controversial to suggest that something analogous should hold for software work? The later Craft vs Engineering section makes far more sense to me. edit: > We are separated from engineering by circumstance, not by essence, and we can choose to bridge that gap at will. I think this is a matter of market forces rather than a community-wide failure. There's high demand for software developers, including for inexperienced software developers with little formal training. This is, at least in principle, a fine thing (ignoring things like major security issues arising from incompetence). Someone who completes a brief course on programming may be called a software developer, and a professor specialising in critical software systems might be called the same. It's not like nuclear engineering where there's a formal system of gatekeeping. Provided we don't ignore the spectrum of expertise, I don't see a reason to worry about software work being intellectually disreputable by nature.
  • JamesBarney 5y ago
    > And yet there's a world of difference between a computer scientists and the average software developer. The world would be served by realizing how different these too skill sets are. I had professors who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, and known successful devs who wouldn't know a proof if it walked up and bit them on the nose.
  • strulovich 5y ago
    >> we actually use discrete math, where we deal exclusively with non-continuous numbers. This includes things like graph theory, logic, and combinatorics. You might not realize that you are using these, but you do. They’re just so internalized in software that we don’t see them as math! > I strongly disagree with this level of charity. That's like saying every cyclist is a physicist. Boolean logic, and while loops are proper examples of discrete math. They’re practiced by virtually every developer. An equivalent example from the world of continuous math could be integrating over some range.
    • MaxBarraclough 5y ago
      Understanding the control-flow constructs of an imperative programming language is not equivalent to understanding the discrete maths of imperative programming (Hoare logic, Z notation, B-method, etc). As I said, the average developer is incapable of doing serious discrete mathematics such as formally proving the correctness of an algorithm. For that matter, I doubt the average developer would know what it means for a language to have a formal semantics. To anticipate the path of a frisbee is to, in mathematical terms, solve a differential equation. Dogs can catch frisbees. We still don't say that dogs understand the mathematics of differential equations. [0][1] In the software world, formal methods are a niche, as are the associated mathematics. Being costly, they are not used in mainstream software work. [0] (PDF) http://www.math.pitt.edu/~bard/bardware/classes/0220/dkc.pdf http://www.math.pitt.edu/~bard/bardware/classes/0220/dkc.pdf [1] https://www.wired.com/1993/05/dogs/ https://www.wired.com/1993/05/dogs/
      • CSSer 5y ago
• pjmlp 5y ago
  Given the professional title, in an university approved by the Engineering Order, definitely. Unfortunately not something with the same value everywhere.
• spacemadness 5y ago
  Why focus on the argument of “Engineering is Mathematical” and ignore “Engineering Uses Scientific Knowledge to Solve Problems?” I’m not heavily invested in the outcome I just found it curious to only focus on mathematical usage as that’s easy to apply to software.
• philipov 5y ago
  Or are we dancers?
  • mrwnmonm 5y ago
    My vote is for this one
• chiyc 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing! This is a great series of articles I've never seen before. I'm also a crossover as defined here and agree with a lot of the perspectives, particularly about the many transferable skills in part three. I think working in a complex manufacturing environment helped me develop software debugging skills. I see the licensure argument get brought up a lot. Many people working in "traditional" engineering fields never get their PE because there's just no need in their industry. Sure, that may not make them a licensed "Engineer" in some jurisdictions, but it doesn't make their work any less engineering. The work done by other engineering fields also varies widely. Looking back on my work as a process engineer, it's honestly hard to say that entailed any more "engineering" than my software position does now.
• belval 5y ago
  I highly recommend people read the article before jumping to the comments because it makes several interesting points. My personal take is that there is no right answer because the definition of engineering is quite wide. Like the author we can argue that some work of the software engineering is indeed engineering (planning, designing, estimating) whereas the act of writing code for a giving feature is more akin to a craft. That being said, I don't really care and I say that as a Canadian software engineering graduate, as opposed to a computer science major. If you like the engineer title and you want to use it (and it's legal in your country) then you should go for it.
  • empressplay 5y ago
    I'd say that if you routinely create new applications or services from scratch and make all of the design decisions (with consultation with colleagues), put them into production and take ownership of them, then you're most definitely a SWE, even if you do pair programming. If on the other hand you generally implement small atomic changes based on predetermined design decisions not made by you and those changes are signed off by other people and you don't put them into production yourself, you're probably better described as a developer. I think the distinction is maybe if you're the (an) architect or not?
  • elteto 5y ago
    Precisely, I don't understand why people get constantly worked up with this. Is _all_ software development engineering? No, of course not. If you are banging out CRUD clone #432 then no, you are not an engineer, you are more of a technician (a programmer in our case). But, consider this, could you design all of Google's infrastructure without applying engineering principles (most likely derived from computer science and computer engineering)? Or perhaps you write and design complex embedded software to fly satellites, where you have to combine knowledge from multiple branches of science. Isn't that engineering? The answer, as most everything else in life, is "it depends".
    • spacechild1 5y ago
      > Precisely, I don't understand why people get constantly worked up with this. I guess because many of those who call themselves engineers are exactly those who bang out CRUD clone #423.
• stakkur 5y ago
  My father-in-law, a lifelong licensed civil engineer, would (and often did) say 'no'.
• mkl95 5y ago
  Modern software engineering is mostly abstraction engineering. If you can build abstractions on top of abstractions and they are profitable, you are probably a good software engineer.
• poulsbohemian 5y ago
  I did a lot of different things in my career... I definitely saw engineering or at least saw something that was a gateway to engineering, but the challenge was that the vast majority of organizations had incentives that went another direction. Meaning, for most the cost and time to engage in any kind of disciplined behaviors was beyond what they were willing to do. Of course, the argument can be made that if they followed engineering practices it might have saved them time and money, but by and large companies don't have the knowledge to do things differently. You could argue that's why they hire software engineers - to show them how to do it right - but my own experiences were that most companies can't get out of their own way. So, sure - there could be such a thing as software engineering, we could all be software engineers, but in most places we just hack along as programmers trying to hold it together with spit and baling wire.
• nyellin 5y ago
  I think we're more similar to writers. Code can be creative or artistic, but structure and discipline are important for anything large. There are technical writers and there are creative writers. You can write about math or science or food. Code has the same range. Coding is just a form of expression and explanation, but machines are the readers not people
• dekhn 5y ago
  I'm a hacker, always have been. Took a detour to be a PhD scientist, and another one to be a "software engineer", but I'm a hacker. And this hacker can tell you: most (95%) of software "engineering" is not engineering, but more or less the equivalent of telling anecdotes about your grandparents experiences while arguing you have a solution to covid. That said, there's 5% of software engineering out there that is engineering; read the RISKS mailing list archives if you want to see some examples (and counterexamples). If software engineers were engineers, testing would be a higher priority, and visible regressions would happen rarely, if at all.
  • amelius 5y ago
    > If software engineers were engineers, testing would be a higher priority, and visible regressions would happen rarely, if at all. You say that as if software engineers determine the priorities ...
    • mrguyorama 5y ago
      The difference between a "software engineer" and a real engineer like a civil engineer is that when a manager type tells a civil engineer to ignore safety or standards for profit reasons, a civil engineer gets to tell them to fuck off
      • conradludgate 5y ago
        You, as a software engineer, should also tell your manager to fuck off if they are making bad decisions. No one is inherently above you. If they're the kind of management to never listen to you then that doesn't make you less of an engineer, that makes them shitty managers to ignore these important principals behind their systems
        • ipaddr 5y ago
          You get fired the real engineer doesn't. You are paid to do what management tells you.
• notch656a 5y ago
  Anyone can be an engineer. If you don't have a PE or an ABET accredited engineering degree then you may still be an engineer, although most likely you're something closer to a technologist (although your skills may be both more valuable and more in demand than an engineer's). I have met maybe two people in my life that have learned the kind of first principles physics and mathematics basis outside of formal channels of academia or licensure. It's just really inconvenient and probably an inefficient use of time for most people to learn to be a classical engineer when you can make more or better by getting damn good at applying some technology (programming, welding, trucking, whatever).
• Tossrock 5y ago
  I think the best definition of engineering is that it's a process of optimization within a solution space bounded by constraints. If you pile up some mud and let it dry, you have made a dwelling but you are not an engineer. If you calculate the load requirements for a series of I-beams given a certain budget and build a skyscraper, you are an engineer. As the author correctly notes, there aren't necessarily hard boundaries on what qualifies as engineering, but I think there clearly are axes on which something is "more engineer-y" vs "less engineer-y", and as the constraints of the solution space go from physical (tension, voltage, pressure) to non-physical (interpersonal relations, public perception, aesthetic judgment), the activity goes from more engineer-y to less engineer-y. In software, we're always optimizing on cost / developer time, but that's closer to the non-physical side of the constraint physicality axis. As you optimize for things like memory usage, execution time, binary size, then you get closer to the physical end of the constraint-type axis, and are thus more engineer-y.
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  • klodolph 5y ago
    > ...as the constraints of the solution space go from physical (tension, voltage, pressure) to non-physical (interpersonal relations, public perception, aesthetic judgment), the activity goes from more engineer-y to less engineer-y. This would put industrial engineering deeply in "less engineer-y" territory, IMO. I think someone is very engineer-y when they pick a simple, easy bridge design which requires less skilled labor to produce, even if this takes them away from working with more juicy physics problems.
    • Tossrock 5y ago
      I think I would agree with that (industrial / process engineering is "less" engineer-y than, say, mechanical engineering), but since they're still optimizing against measurable physical constraints (how many chiller units can we fit in this section of the warehouse, how long does it take a worker to move from the freight deck to the storage racks, etc), I think they're over my personal line. But of course, drawing sharp category boundaries is a losing game, which is why I prefer to think in terms of axes / vector spaces.
• dpweb 5y ago
  Maybe it’s the intangibility that lends to an attitude of less respect. Designing something in the physical world like a road you can’t screw up or people might get hurt. You could say the same about software but only in a very few instances. There’s no necessary reverence for the laws of the natural world. Electricity and gravity will kill you.
  • phillipcarter 5y ago
    Hmmm. I don't necessarily know if I agree with that framing. I think there's a lot of software out there that could cause severe harm if it weren't written well enough, or its use cases were not thoroughly thought through. Thinking of all the software that runs hospitals, banks, etc. And then all the indirect harm caused in consumer software (often among teens). Not to mention software written for evil purposes, such as that to take down power networks, support child trafficking, etc. I think there's a pretty strong case to by made that software is serious business. Even if fiddling around with terraform providers or whatever feel pointless sometimes.
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• dvh 5y ago
  Watch "Das Boot", the entire ship has one engineer and he commands respect in the movie.
• cpach 5y ago
  “We are Devo. D–E–V–O.”
• psyc 5y ago
  Are Customer Satisfaction Engineers really engineers? Are software architects really architects? Is a Doctor of Philosophy a real doctor? Edit: apparently that should have been “Is a MD a real doctor?” TIL :D The only reason this dumb question refuses to die is that software developers can actually borrow and apply approaches from “real” engineering. The difference is that “we” do not have to, either to be successful, or to be in compliance with any regulation or cultural expectation (with exceptions). I’m also generally annoyed by the retroactive continuity of it all. “Software Engineer” started as a job title chosen by HR on a per-company, not industry-wide, basis, and not as a flavor of Professional Engineering. We’re probably closer to that aspiration now (unevenly distributed) but it still stinks of post hoc justification.
  • philosopher1234 5y ago
    >Is a Doctor of Philosophy a real doctor Nitpick, but yes, actually "doctor" comes from the latin "to teach" and originally refers to doctor of philosophy, and has been co-opted for MDs. The real question is "are mds (who dont teach) real doctors?"
    • Cd00d 5y ago
      That's interesting. Though, I'm not a fan of the notion that I'm no longer a Dr. after leaving academia post PhD. But, that's just my emotional take, and doesn't counter your origination history.
      • Supermancho 5y ago
        > I'm no longer a Dr. after leaving academia post PhD "Does a PhD thesis have to be novel?" - I don't care how you slice that answer, even if you were confirming/revisiting existing studies. If you have a PhD, you contributed to human knowledge in either the master or PhD theses, imo.
      • xtracto 5y ago
        Hey, I did my PhD more than 10 years ago, and I've taught more in my time in industry than what I could have taught in academia.
• amelius 5y ago
  We're plumbers, not engineers.
  • 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
    Dude. We're definitely not plumbers. It takes years to become a plumber. Plumbers have to hold a high school diploma, enter a trade program, begin an apprenticeship that can take up to five years to complete (required to be able to work as a plumber), pass a state exam and become licensed, and join a trade association. They have to follow codes and standards, and often work with other trades like architects putting together blueprints. Plumbers are business people, too; they have to get clients, keep up with them, get paid, and survive on their reputation. And for all that, they make on average $57k a year in the US. We're artisan primadonnas who get paid three times that of a plumber, with literally no requirements to do so. There are people working at online banks who haven't completed high school.
• protontorpedo 5y ago
  Does it even matter? It doesn't, this is like comparing apples to oranges. The biggest reason there is more rigor in other fields is because they are less iteration-friendly. I personally call myself a programmer, even if my job title says engineer.
• Barrin92 5y ago
  I'd say the core of what engineering is, is building something according to formal specifications and well-defined error-rates and constraints. It need not be mathematical in nature but it has to be strict and measurable. And as a consequence, almost any engineering discipline has well-defined methodologies and processes, and engineers are formally trained. I think this is in line with the intuition of the article. Someone who writes software for a spacecraft is an engineer because they work within extremely well defined limits and towards strictly enforced specifications. People who write software for the military or who write compilers probably do too. I don't think this applies to how most software developers work when it comes to the web or just your average project. There is in my experience no rigor of that sort. People just write code, and sure there's performance considerations but usually not in a systematic way, and it's often more tinkering than engineering.
  • razzio 5y ago
    This makes sense to me as someone educated as an electronics engineer. I've since moved over to software development and on occasion feel it can be called engineering, but more often it cannot. > building something according to formal specifications within constraints... Yes this is close to what I consider engineering, but maybe it is better to say 'design something according formal specifications within a set of constraints'. Engineering is a process of design. Does this mean implementation is excluded from the definition of engineering? Plumbers and carpenters build according to specifications and architects design the specifications yet neither are called engineers. Software development more often than not has little in terms of formal specifications and design, and as the article points out it is very much a field of change. It also focuses mostly on implementation instead of design. That is closer to what a plumber, carpenter and other tradesmen do.
  • Veserv 5y ago
    I think you are largely correct, but I think I would instead characterize it as well-defined requirements and guarantees. What I mean by these terms is: requirements are a formal statement of a problem, guarantees are a formal statement about a solution, and a specification is a formal implementation that guarantees the requirements are met. For instance, using the case of a bridge, the requirement might be something like: "lasts 10 years, max 10 ton load", the implementation might be a steel bridge, and the guarantee of the specification might be something like: "lasts 20 years, max 20 ton load". Put another way, the key distinction is that engineering has an objective measure of what is considered adequate (i.e. solving the problem) and an expectation that only adequate solutions should be implemented.
• boringg 5y ago
  As engineers in Canada you have a Ritual to Calling which is supposed to be similar to an oath to public safety above all. And to be a professional engineer you have to go through a training period and a final test to be considered. I am mostly talking about physical engineers here (Civil, Chemical, Mechanical, Electrical, etc) That said - the term engineer (software engineer specifically) has been heavily diluted - same as data scientist - to the point of irrelevance or that it points to some basic proficiency of understanding and capability and not some level of mathematical knowledge. There are lots of exceptions and many people who are highly adept and capable but I wouldn't say that is an accurate portrayal of the entire class of title-holders.
  • ghaff 5y ago
    > engineer (software engineer specifically) has been heavily diluted Oh, it goes way beyond that and has for decades. When I was in the oil business, you saw all manner of job titles with engineer on them like (drilling) mud engineer that people would joke were actually mud salesmen which they basically were. And the computer company I worked for for a long time used system engineer for a pre-sales role that supported the account reps.
• maxbaines 5y ago
  Maybe we should Ask Brunel, or perhaps a little more recently dare I say Elon Musk. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isambard_Kingdom_Brunel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isambard_Kingdom_Brunel I won’t link Elon Musk.
• sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
  I'm just me
• commandlinefan 5y ago
  > getting the wires to bend correctly and the plastic onto this shiny piece of anodized aluminium wire. […] That was the thing that took three months in the project. Well, there you go, that's how I know we're not really engineers. Because every software developer working reports to (or reports to somebody who reports to) somebody who lives by the maxim "if it takes more than an hour to do, it's not worth doing".
• SeanLuke 5y ago
  This guy seems to think that engineers only make things that are dangerous. Sure, there are engineers that build bridges. But there are also enormous numbers of computer engineers that build custom ASICs for, I dunno, TVs and Furbies. There are electrical engineers that build RF tag antennae for cartons in warehouses. There are chemical engineers who design more tasty marshmallows. On the other hand, there are also computer scientists who build software for nuclear power plants and fighter jets, which must be perfect or people will die. This is the problem with traditional engineering as a discipline: they require certification as a gatekeeping mechanism, under the pretense that some engineers do things that require safety protocols. Thus Real Engineers are certified to do Dangerous Work. To me engineering is simply the application of math and science to design and ultimately build. In this respect, computer scientists are inarguably engineers.
  • chongli 5y ago
    A lot of those other things are (potentially) dangerous too. TVs and furbies with electronics in them could give you an electric shock or start a fire. Bad marshmallows could poison you or give you cancer. The people writing the software for power plants or jets should be licensed software engineers, not coding bootcamp alumni. The whole point of licensure is to add a degree of accountability to any job which involves danger to the public.
    • exdsq 5y ago
      I believe the real core part of being a licensed engineer is you can be personally liable for mistakes in plans you sign off on, and to be able to do this you need to take exams and complete training showing you're capable of doing this correctly. This isn't a thing in programming.
      • chongli 5y ago
        It is a thing for software engineering students at University of Waterloo. They take physics and chemistry courses and learn all about safety and various standards. They write exams and at the end they become licensed professional engineers with iron rings.
• ineedasername 5y ago
  "this is an important question" I'm not so sure about that. I'm not very concerned with the labels. I think it's fair to say it might be in a gray area, and maybe she me day in the future it will resolve into one or the other. It's probably useful to understand why "engineer" is attached to the field in the first place. I think it's because CompSci programs often grew of of Electrical Engineering programs: that's where a lot of programming started, way back. When Comp Sci went it's own way as a distinct field, it kept the "engineer" association even though it almost completely ( especially today) lost much emphasis on EE. When I was looking at grad programs 20 years ago, even then a Master's degree at a very good tech University only had a single required EE course. Entry requirements for those not in CompSci undergrads we're 4 courses: discrete math, assembly, a grad-level fast paced intro to programming, and a course dedicated to algorithms. EE knowledge wasn't required or emphasized at any level. So programming has strong roots in engineering, but expanded beyond it. I'm fine with this gray area.
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  • nitwit005 5y ago
    Was going to say the same. The article doesn't back that statement up with anything. Many of us don't have engineer in our job title, and I've never heard of anyone being upset at it not being there.
    • hugofirth 5y ago
      It does though, the primary thesis of the article is that the question (whether or not software engineering is engineering) is important because if software engineering is the real deal, then we're ignoring useful lessons from all the other disciplines.
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• WalterBright 5y ago
  Actually, I am a real engineer, and designing gearboxes for airplanes is quite real. So are programmers engineers or not? Consider real engineering at Boeing. There are engineers and technicians (aka draftsmen) working side by side. They are often doing the same work. The difference, as far as Boeing is concerned, is the engineers have a degree in engineering and the technicians do not. But if they are often doing exactly the same thing, what's the real difference? Think of it another way. Think of an auto mechanic. He can fix your car. He can take your car apart and put it back together. He can customize it. But is he an auto engineer (who often does those tasks, too)? Nope. A programmer, technician, mechanic plugs numbers into formulas, follows instructions and procedures and practices laid out by an engineer. An engineer derives the formulas, writes the instructions, develops the procedures, and refines the practices. For example, a technician builds a band pass filter by using a circuit he's already used before and knows works. Maybe he'll tweak the RC values. An engineer will drive the RC values needed by understanding the calculation. The technician may use calculation (though they rarely do), but they don't understand where the formula comes from. An engineer does. In software, a programmer calls a sort function from the supplied library. An engineer writes the sort function, and can tell you its complexity and why the algorithm he chose (or invented) is the most appropriate one for the particular sorting task, and what the cases are where the sort will perform poorly, and why.
  • jolmg 5y ago
    > engineers have a degree in engineering > An engineer writes the sort function, and can tell you its complexity and why the algorithm he chose (or invented) is the most appropriate one for the particular sorting task, and what the cases are where the sort will perform poorly, and why. So what of the people that can do this but don't have a degree? And what of the people that have a degree in engineering but can't do this? Are both also engineers, or are neither of them engineers, or is one an engineer but not the other?
    • WalterBright 5y ago
      I said that Boeing defined engineers as having a degree in engineering. That is clearly not my definition. I've known engineers that were no better than mechanics. And a couple (very rare) mechanics who could do engineer work, and would be engineers in my estimation.
• luisrudge 5y ago
  in my linkedin I am :D
• mrwnmonm 5y ago
  That Atlantic article is too long and doesn't get to the point. Philosophers are faster than this.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  It took an engineer to invent Autotune. A programmer never would have been able to.
• zwieback 5y ago
  A long time ago when this was discussed someone suggested "software gardener" would be a good term. As a professional software developer and hobby gardener I kind of agree.
• throwaway984393 5y ago
  "Engineers work on predictable projects with a lot of upfront planning and rigorous requirements. Software is dynamic, constantly changing, unpredictable." Ask someone building medical robots if their software is unpredictable. Or someone building a car ECU. Or an airplane guidance system. Or controls for industrial machinery. Or telecom equipment. Our entire industry literally follows a manifesto whose purpose was to eliminate upfront planning and rigorous requirements, called "Agile". It was an intentional choice to be irresponsible, and we all ate it up because it meant we didn't have to do any due diligence. Just churn out software turds as fast as you can, get a big smile and a thumbs up from the user, and you're done. Who cares if tomorrow it fails and the thermostats for 10,000 houses goes out in the middle of winter? At least we didn't have to write documentation! Moving too fast over here, can't be worried about shit like "making sure it's safe" ! Oh, whoops!, every social security number in the country is exposed. But we could never have prevented that, we write software, it's inherently unpredictable! It's all too predictable. The industry is led by children who don't know how to do their jobs, there are no industry requirements or certifications, and there is no trade school to really learn. Can you imagine an electrician wiring your house up after a 6 week "boot camp" ? Or a mechanical engineering intern building a bridge?
• pjerem 5y ago
  Nope. HRs like to write "Software Engineer" on my payroll. Good if it pleases them and my ego. But I never graduated from an engineering school. But I do the same mud stacking (that is plugging bricks to do CRUDs) as my fellow "real engineers" coworkers. I have too much respect for anyone designing mechanical stuff to call our industry "engineering".
  • xtracto 5y ago
    > But I do the same mud stacking (that is plugging bricks to do CRUDs) as my fellow "real engineers" coworkers. That's the problem with the current state of the Software Development field: Most of the work (90% I'd pull out of my ass) can be done by "qualified technicians", what in Germany is called Berufsschule, in Mexico "Técnico Superior" [2] and in the US I think it may be the result of studying in a Community College. The work of Software Engineers themselves, that should be doing real Engineering work. To prepare the ground and the "map" for the Technicians to build. It's the difference between an Architect (in an architecture firm) and their armies of interns or technicians (don't know the name in English). Or a Lawyer and also all the people that work for them (interns). The thing is, that the Software/Computer/IT Engineer degree has been watered down since its inception for 40 years. I think mainly due to the huge demand that the Computing field has had for developers during this time. [1] https://eacea.ec.europa.eu/national-policies/eurydice/content/organisation-vocational-upper-secondary-education-20_en https://eacea.ec.europa.eu/national-policies/eurydice/conten... [2] https://www.sectei.cdmx.gob.mx/oferta-educativa/tecnico-superior-universitario-tsu https://www.sectei.cdmx.gob.mx/oferta-educativa/tecnico-supe...
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• kloch 5y ago
  Titles are cheap. Better questions: Do you have the knowledge and experience to do your job well? Is your brain naturally wired for the type of work you do?
• exdsq 5y ago
  On a side note I saw Renaissance Technologies still hire "Computer Programmers" which I thought was pretty nostalgic. They also are hiring System Administrators and Network Technicians. No fluff at one of the highest paying firms :)
  • dhuk_2018 5y ago
    Don't get me started with "network engineer"...
  • blippage 5y ago
    When people ask me what I do, I say "computer programmer". I can't be doing with all that job title inflation. Sometimes I just say "programmer", but that seems to confuse people; like I'm the guy who decides at what time The Simpsons goes on telly, or something.
• AussieWog93 5y ago
  I studied Engineering in university (Electrical was my primary discipline, but in the first year we also spent some time on Civil, Chemical and Materials Eng) before later moving onto Software Engineering as a career. To me, the biggest difference between SWE and the other "real" Engineering disciplines is about respect for the laws of physics. Engineers from the classical disciplines have a deep understanding of the immutability of physical laws, and build mental models that accurately represent this as best they can. SWEs, on the other hand, have a tendency to build mental models that are more conceptual or metaphysical, and try and force these onto real-world silicon. (This is somewhat idealised, of course. There are hack engineers that don't understand first principles in the slightest, just as there are software engineers who have no high-level understanding of the code they just copy-pasted from Stack Overflow).
  • razzio 5y ago
    That is an interesting distinction. Laws of physics are clearly a constraint to whatever is being engineered. In software development this sometimes plays a role too, more so on embedded and real-time systems. Real-time systems have a time constraints which is a law of physics and embedded software development has to incorporate memory, cpu and sometimes thermal constraints. I do consider software for these systems closer to engineering, so you might be on to something. That doesn't mean I'd exclude other software development but the notions of (law of physics) constraints and predictable outcome are important factors.
  • goodpoint 5y ago
    > SWEs, on the other hand, have a tendency to build mental models that are more conceptual or metaphysical, and try and force these onto real-world silicon. Aka if you are a good software engineer you understand well how hardware works and how to push the boundaries. If you a Stack Overflow copypaste technician you are nowhere near an engineer.
    • AussieWog93 5y ago
      >Aka if you are a good software engineer you understand well how hardware works and how to push the boundaries. It's not even necessarily about pushing the boundaries and milking every last drop out of the hardware; there's a culture amongst even productive senior software engineers of handwaving over hardware altogether. From my experience, bringing up optimisations or performance around non-embedded, non-gaming software engineers will invariably steer the discussion towards big-O notation and algorithmic abstractions.
• 1970-01-01 5y ago
  I've made this question into a poll. Let's vote on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30000645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30000645
• r_hoods_ghost 5y ago
  I think this is the key point, and it's one I'd agree with "...software engineering is real engineering, but a lot of people who write software aren’t doing software engineering." Personally I would probably draw the circle of software engineers fairly tightly and acknowledge that the rest of us are programmers, or developers, or software architects, or plumbers. I'd certainly exclude someone like myself from the magic circle of software engineer. My career started accidentally in economic and environmental modeling (ah GAMS, my psycho ex, how I miss you), currently involves creating addons for Blender, went through a brief CRUD app phase back when Facebook was young (shudder) and has involved random trips into data science at various points. I'd also exclude virtually everyone I've ever worked with if I'm honest because most of what I've worked on has either been bespoke and artisanal and so was been software crafting, or it's essentially been plumbing together systems designed by real software engineers and then prettying up the resultant monster. Despite that I've had the title software engineer a few times, as have lots of my colleagues. I'm not sure that the author is right in saying that it is easier for programmers to transform into software engineers than tradesmen into real engineers. I definitely think that in both cases some seriously heavy training and a lot of unlearning needs to be done.
  • nicktorba 5y ago
    The reason it is easier for programmers to transform into software engineers is the same reason we are having this conversation. For the most part, I think this is because software is so cheap and accessible. Anyone can become a software artisan with just a laptop and time. For traditional engineering, you need resources. Here's a quote from the second post: "When it comes to things like making circuit boards, it’s pretty common for things not to work the first time. You have to do it again, and you have to send it out to the factory and do it again. You know it costs you another however many £1000 and another two weeks on the schedule. -Mike (electrical)" If building software was expensive like engineering in the physical world, we wouldn't have to have this argument. It's too bad that physical engineering is so expensive, because we'd probably have a lot more people trying it out.
• jimmyvalmer 5y ago
  Just because we use [discrete, not continuous] math doesn’t mean we’re not doing engineering Yes, it does. The analog-digital divide makes engineering that much harder than programming where 1's remain 1's and 0's remain 0's regardless of real-world curveballs like temperature and fat people.
  • CSSer 5y ago
    Isn't the appeal you're making also refuted by the article? "not all forms of engineering result in physical processes. In particular, industrial engineering rarely does."[0] [0]:https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/#:~:text=not%20all%20forms%20of%20engineering%20result%20in%20physical%20processes.%20In%20particular%2C%20industrial%20engineering%20rarely%20does https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/#:~....
• bastardoperator 5y ago
  Does it matter if we are or aren't? I think some of us are, I think some folks are artists, some are scientist, some are laborers. It doesn't really matter because at the end of the day, unlike other disciplines all of these people can come together, collaborate, and produce things that captivate people, business, science, etc... I tend refer to myself as a generalist because I'm not sure one label really fits. I do a bunch of different things, but the reality is I'm just trying to add value for myself, my customer, my teams and my business and I do it mostly with my thoughts and a computer.
• conradludgate 5y ago
  I'm a software engineer by day, software craftsman by night. My own personal work is made with love and care but I won't necessarily fret over details like extreme testing, scalability, readability of the code. My paid work is a lot more thorough. Meetings and planning. Group work. Testing. My work does have consequences (although I think that's not really a prerequisite for the title of engineering). While no official board has standards of software. My work definitely has standards. My peers and managers have standards that we enforce upon ourselves
  • conradludgate 5y ago
    I think there's one key term that hasn't been mentioned in relation to this debate much: accountability. Engineers are a countable for their work. I am accountable if my code fucks up in production. An engineer is accountable if a foundation fails. Not "how bad are the consequences", but "am I accountable if something does goes wrong"
• nicktorba 5y ago
  I thought I was over this argument because it always hits a dead end, but Hillel took a really entertaining approach with this series. Looking back, I'm almost always having this argument with other software people, but never traditional engineers. I hadn't thought much about how our stereotypes are wrong. A great example from the second post in the series is how software people don't have experience with the unpredictability of traditional engineering projects: "Part of this misconception comes from us seeing the results of the engineering process, not the process itself. We don’t see the friction, the overruns, the delays that happen because someone built the wall one inch to the left, or when a critical supplier goes out of business. To assume that software is uniquely unpredictable is a special kind of arrogance." This has me wondering why the software world is so unpredictable in the first place and why we aren't working on that? Or at least getting better at dealing with it. Also, why are we so inclined to think the physical world is so predictable? Probably because we spend so much time on our computers... excited to finish the rest of this series
  • mLuby 5y ago
    > This has me wondering why the software world is so unpredictable in the first place… Also, why are we so inclined to think the physical world is so predictable? Ignoring time spent designing, software's manufacturing time is essentially zero. Compare that with days/weeks for devices and years for vessels/structures. So because we're used to the latter timescale, the pace of software feels like watching a video at 100x speed. If engineers could instantly and cheaply print each new version of the airplane or bridge they're tasked with building, they'd start looking a lot more like the software industry. When software doesn't have its rapid/free iteration superpower (as in the early days or in must-never-fail situations), it starts looking like traditional engineering.
• paxys 5y ago
  First define "engineering", then ask that question.
• paxys 5y ago
  The US Supreme court has ruled that the First Amendment allows us to call ourselves engineers, so at least in this jurisdiction – yes, we are (if we choose).
• mslate 5y ago
  Yes, we’re all engineers. Some better than others. A piece of paper changes nothing, only in the legal system in which you operate.
• monksy 5y ago
  I think Hillel is a pretty interesting guy. But I think that he's a bit missing the mark here. It feels like his view of engineers is that they are people who can put together a solution and then use a lot of fancy numbers and established facts to support their solution. In his oil drilling example.. he's not going into the same issues that we face. (Is that drilling analyze for failure worth the money in investigation, etc) With software engineering you're putting together instructions to fit within a computer's hardware capacity to solve your problem in the context that you need to operate it. There are a lot of ways about it .. however we have a lot of issues in our field surrounding the technical aspect on this: 1. Academics is dead focused on the hard part of language schemas, grammars, correctness-proofs, etc. 2. The research that we have about design patterns and their usages are nothing more than surveys and try to debunk a negative. (This goes back to the whole "academics proved unit tests don't provide value") [The results are never influential and they completely ignore the quality of the data] Additionally: I want to say that as engineers .. at companies, we're put into aggressive processes and methodologies that prevent us from operating a very high quality output. As a software engineer, you should have verification to prove your program works as intended, you should have monitoring to validate that constantly in production, you should have experience+data that supports the design decisions. There are metrics there to quantify our solutions.. but being business and shipping led.. that's forced to the wayside. --- Slight addition here: We're in a phase in the industry where experience is completely ignored and we're forgoing technical "merit"(By that I mean experience, strong practices, discipline.. not the business says I'm good) in favor of blasting people into the door. We're not getting a lot of people that are willing to learn from the methods of old and make constructive commentary, we're getting people that are not willing to be disciplined, and we're getting people who forgo good practices because "they dont' wanna". (You see this all the time with lazy arguments about people hating to do unit tests, bad tooling, etc) TL;DR to my argument, are we engineers right now.. some have the privilege to be.. but most are punished for doing so because it may annoy the PO. We totally can be engineers, no one really rewards you for this.
• Scramblejams 5y ago
  I come from an aerospace engineering background (did structural engineering on commercial aircraft that were in the design and approval stages) and am in software now (games). I've had two different takes on this. Neither is perfect. Would appreciate comments on them. (a) If it's regularly expected that you ship bugs, you might be in a discipline that is distinct from engineering.[0] (b) If you can usually reach for an abstraction to save you, you might be working in something that isn't engineering.[1] [0] If software is engineering, then it's the only engineering discipline I'm aware of in which the participants are regularly expected to produce deliverables they don't fully understand. What do I mean by that? Well, if we software peeps fully understood our deliverables, we wouldn't have bugs, or at least, we'd always know what bugs are there. If as a structural engineer I had delivered a final draft of an analysis document which showed that I didn't fully understand the part and how it would perform, my boss would not have been pleased. Most software bugs are treated more casually than that, so we clearly have a tolerance for delivering work that we don't fully understand. You might take issue with the idea that I "fully understood" a structural part. Fair. When I calculated the strength of a beam in a thrust reverser I didn't understand the individual molecular interactions, I didn't need to know if the metal was of a body-centered cubic crystal structure, etc. But this is because I was able to apply well-understood and rigorously accepted simplifying assumptions that were conservative (from the point of view of a factor of safety), and fully encapsulated all the understanding I needed to produce a part fit for use. [1] This feels like the more flawed of the two proposals, because I expect EEs can do this. Control systems folks can definitely do this, and I would absolutely call them engineers.
  • netizen-936824 5y ago
    >When I calculated the strength of a beam in a thrust reverser I didn't understand the individual molecular interactions, I didn't need to know if the metal was of a body-centered cubic crystal structure, etc. But this is because I was able to apply well-understood and rigorously accepted simplifying assumptions that were conservative (from the point of view of a factor of safety), and fully encapsulated all the understanding I needed to produce a part fit for use. While I fully agree with almost everything in your post, this sounds an awful lot like an abstraction to me. Perhaps the different between creating software and engineering based on the physical sciences is the degree in which the abstractions are understood and rigorous. Perhaps software engineering is simply in its infancy and may eventually lead to more rigorous designs with less or no bugs in the future?
• d--b 5y ago
  I agree with the conclusion that we shouldn't shut the door. It would be stupid to not try and take into account the experience of other engineering disciplines, just because "we don't fit the mold perfectly". Sometimes it'll help, and sometimes it won't. What's interesting is to engage with other people. I am lucky in that regard to have been trained in a French "engineering school", where I was trained in electrical engineering, electronical engineering, signal processing engineering, computer science, and logistics. People I was trained with work on the electricity grid, others on the noise that care tires make. There is no question that knowing concepts about electricity or control theory made me a better software engineer.
• daveungerer 5y ago
  > I found in my research that people defending the title “engineer” rarely coherently define what an engineer is, usually boiling it down to “engineers solve problems”. The arguments against the title tend to be a little more developed, as are the arguments about transcending it. It's a pity the author didn't go into more detail about why problem-solving is not the key defining characteristic of engineers. Since the author claims this is somehow not coherent enough, I'll share my very strong view that this is exactly what separates engineers from programmers: Engineers apply technology to solve problems. They are rarely interested in technology just for the sake of it (that's what scientists are for), but rather in what it can do for them. Most people in our industry today are far from being engineers. Engineers don't pick their technologies based on hype (or more charitably, excitement), and then try to find problems to solve. That's how some companies ended up using machine learning for projects where simpler statistical methods would have sufficed. It's how inexperienced developers fell for MongoDB's marketing and jumped straight to using it without considering whether it's better for their use case than the alternatives. It explains how at some point a ton of companies were using blockchain for things that could have been done with centralised databases (although that one's likely more due to company executives trying to impress investors). If you’re always focused on using the latest thing, you’ll always have a solution in search of a problem. Reach for new tools when you have or anticipate a problem that you think might reasonably be solved by such tools. Do that and you've at least inched a bit closer to being able to reasonably refer to yourself as software engineer... if that's your thing - I'm generally not a fan of the title myself, but the engineering mindset is the most important thing I look for when interviewing candidates.
• ggambetta 5y ago
  LOL no. We're artisans and craftsmen.
• FridgeSeal 5y ago
  > Pete McBreen and Paul Graham who say that we are not engineers because engineering cannot apply to our domain. Engineers work on predictable projects with a lot of upfront planning and rigorous requirements This strikes me as a really silly argument, it has an element of “we’re too good for other engineering disciplines “. I don’t think it’s difference in our specifications, software engineering does still apply the same underlying principles and intents in solving problems. Admittedly, software engineering has some way to go to reach the same levels of guarantees and rigour, but the fundamentals are there.
  • alanh 5y ago
    I think it’s less that software programmers are "too good," and more that interesting programming work is too new to have established engineering practices/standards/etc
• jll29 5y ago
  Yes, some of us are: I take the position that whether software engineering is an appropriate term does depend on the individual and the team and organization they are embedded on. There are individuals, teams and organizations where the term "software engineering" is fitting, whereas others do not deserve it. For many years, a lot of software development was pioneering (many projects build the first X of its kind e.g. the first OS, the first word processor, the first spreadsheet, the first Web browser). Bridge construction, in contrast, is older, so not as many bridges are pioneering new techniques. The predictability that is associated with trad. engineering can only take hold once things of a kind have been done often enough so best practices can emerge. BTW, software engineering isn't the only type of non-traditional engineering: the University of Cambridge has one of Europe's best engineering departments; part of it is a group called Information Engineering, where software systems and models for e.g. speech recognition are researched and developed.
• TheDudeMan 5y ago
  We are not. And I'm fine with that. Please stop calling me an engineer.
• dgut 5y ago
  There are three types: - CS person who has in-depth understanding of how computers works and mathematics. Typically writes code in a low-level language, can write a compiler, mostly will solve computer problems that indirectly solve problems at a consumer level. - Developer person who is analytical and has a good grasp of mathematics. Can build tools to be used by other developer persons. Uses high-level languages to solve problems at a consumer level. - Hacker person who uses tools built by the CS and developer person to solely solve problems at a consumer level.
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I feel that I am. It doesn't really matter. I tend to work on my own stuff. I started as an EE, and a lot of the discipline from there, has traveled with me, in my software adventure. I don't ship bugs (that I'm aware of). My issues need to be at 0, before I will release.
• loeg 5y ago
  (2021)
• citizenpaul 5y ago
  The difference is simple. We are not engineers for the same reason cheerleaders are not athletes. There is too much money to be made by trivializing the industry and the players involved benefit greatly by lobbying against it being "real" engineering. Whats the difference between a skyscraper and pool house in terms of "real" engineering. Nothing. Whats the differene between a spacecrafts code engineering and a website. Nothing. There are just lower stakes and it is used as a straw-man against professionalizing the industry of software.
• tomc1985 5y ago
  I had the privilege of sharing office space with the engineers at a former employer, with at one point sitting next to a chemical engineer on my left and a mechanical engineer on my right. The former spent all day analyzing formulations and generating test data, and the latter spent all day putting together various parts and gizmos in SolidWorks. To me the biggest difference between us (besides the work itself) was process -- this half of the engineering department was full of it. And it was respected. There were notebooks describing process for every little thing, and so much of the work produced had to be signed off on. We sometimes worked together closely, as we were building machines that were driven by software, and I felt respected by them and they seemed comfortable with us being titled Software Engineers. We seemed to share a similar mindset and curiosity about the world and discussions tended towards the scientific. Though, I would note that that software org spent a lot of time writing things in-house; our department had almost zero integration with outside vendors save those that were performing some other service for us. I am not sure that this modern flavor of "software engineering," where it seems more time is spenting thinking about how to glue together various services, resembles what we did there.
• reaperducer 5y ago
  Glad to see this come up, because maybe five years ago I had an argument about this with a guy at a tiki bar in Vegas during CES. I don't remember what argument I made (again, because it was at a bar in Vegas), but it was potent enough that he and his girlfriend relocated to another part of the bar. People have surprisingly strong opinions about this. The term "engineer" has been bastardized over the last 40 years. Housewives became "domestic engineers." Janitors became "custodial engineers." Garbage men because "waste handling engineers." None of them are engineers. If I was an engineer, I hope I'd be more amused than miffed. But as far as I'm concerned, engineering is a science; software is an art. But it's not like "artist" hasn't been bastardized in recent years. Witness the Subway "sandwich artist." Renoir tosses in his grave. Picasso, not so much.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• thenerdhead 5y ago
  Ah yes, the yearly debate on whether software engineers are real engineers and the strawman arguments about other disciplines & qualifications. The typical gatekeeping mentality of those who have degrees and those who don't. It's not very productive or even worthwhile to peruse. We all deal with creep scope, people, and problems. Let's stop debating stupid titles or certifications.
  • ajkjk 5y ago
    I think you've kinda ignored the fact that this is a really good article with a complex take on the question that's tackling the silliness of the question head-on instead of just shouting opinions into the void.
    • thenerdhead 5y ago
      This is a repost https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25823907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25823907 We all do the same thing and have the same levels of education or experience. Let’s stop debating titles that are already established in the industry. It’s quite apparent that majority of people agree and a select few don’t.
• saltyfamiliar 5y ago
  I think a lot of people here (and the author of the article) are missing the obvious: an engineer is someone who works with engines. An engine is basically just a machine that does work. The question is really whether software can be considered "machines." They're certainly complex devices made up of different parts working in unison that perform work, so I think yes. If a bridge can be considered a machine then surely so can software. Therefore, programmers are engineers. All this talk about rigid specifications, certifications, math, respect for the title, etc. is very odd to me.
  • nicktorba 5y ago
    what do you think about plumbers and carpenters not being considered engineers?
• bsedlm 5y ago
  software engineering is like roman civil engineering
• cbsmith 5y ago
  I look at it like "sanitation engineer". That's a real engineering job that requires engineering expertise to do right, but the term is often used (sometimes derisively) for anyone who does anything involving waste/cleaning.
• DwnVoteHoneyPot 5y ago
  An engineer doesn't say "Move fast and break things".
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• kache_ 5y ago
  yes we are *if we is anything like me
• ajkjk 5y ago
  I really like the writing style on this. Very practical and readable, while getting straight at the interesting philosophical questions and not using a bunch of vapid filler. Also here's a take: yeah, software engineering is engineering, it's just really _bad_ engineering which is why we're missing most of the things you'd expect to see in an engineer. We're in the early days of the craft, like 20% of the way to wherever it will end up, and we're doing the equivalent of, say, the structural engineering that goes into building a log cabin.
• qudat 5y ago
  IMO, Engineering is the application of science. Software development is the application of computer science. Using this definition, physicians are engineers, applying medical sciences.
• zmmmmm 5y ago
  One of the reasons engineers exist is to mitigate a high cost of getting something wrong. That's different to saying "people could die" ... it can be as mundane as, once we've made a million of these widgets there's a very high cost to remake them all because something was miscalculated. When software work heavily incorporates these elements of process and planning, I call it engineering. When it doesn't (for example, when it's built entirely agile style with literally no planning ahead beyond what we do for the next 2 weeks) I don't.
• andrewla 5y ago
  For the life of me I can't get invested in these semantic games. The author even acknowledges Wittgenstein! This question only matters as regarding whether it has operational significance, and it's really hard to imagine a situation where the term would have any operational significance. The author says that we can benchmark against other engineering disciplines and look for guidance or inspiration if software is engineering. But we can do that whether or not we use the term! We can compare software to plumbing, and take away what we can, or compare it to law and take away what we can, or compare it to electrical engineering and take away what we can. The term itself is irrelevant here.
  • Warwolt 5y ago
    I think this is bang on the money. Before asking _if_ software engineering is "real engineering" we should ask what we mean by engineering and why the question matters, otherwise it's a fruitless effort of talking past each other. Hillel seems to want to ask if we're "real engineers" so that we can learn from the other engineering disciplines, especially on taking responsibility, which I think is a good way to frame the question. Most of these comments seem to instead bicker about semantics, which I feel misses the opportunity to be more focused and constructive.
• bee_rider 5y ago
  I would cast a really wide net and say that an engineer is someone who produces designs in compliance with the best methods for their particular field. I don't think most of us software folks are engineers, because the work-product in this field is usually a particular implementation, rather than a design. Last time I worked on a big project, the person whose job seemed the most engineer-y was the 'Software Architect' but I don't know if that title is standardized. I think our fixation on this title is really silly and strange. I did an engineering degree, the math is a little easier than physics because we're aiming to get to the sort of standard answers, and then there's some extra memorization. I could understand people with no technical background at all being impressed by the title, but if you've done a CS or a Physics degree you've almost certainly seen harder problems. What's so cool about it? We just learned how to compose the answers as boringly as possible. Edit: also most of my friends from engineering school went on to become programmers because it is more fun and you don't have to worry about letting the magic smoke out.
• zaptheimpaler 5y ago
  > Many people have asked me why I care so much about this project. Why does it matter whether or not software is “really” engineering? Why can’t we just say that “software is software”? It’s because of these misconceptions. People have a stereotyped notion of what engineering looks like. Because software doesn’t look like the stereotype, they assume that we are wholly unlike engineering. This helped me understand his motivation, although I like to frame the problem differently.. more like "why does software seemingly fail to learn from other disciplines, or even its own history?". IMO the answers are sort of universal - the best practitioners do know, but they either can't/won't teach due to time or legal constraints, and even if they did no one would listen. I've seen good tech-company internal wiki articles that are often much more comprehensive and well thought out than a 100 blog posts. It happens in many other fields like say quantitative trading, or law or hardware/semi manufacturing too. There is a low base level of public knowledge, say like TA or PE ratios in investing, and then real firms are decades ahead. I feel like it is the difference between a small, loosely competence based hierarchy (like a company) vs. a huge, flat network like the internet. Hierarchies are able to continuously build upon a structured body of information, even codifying knowledge that only a few people within the hierarchy understand. Flat networks don't work that way for better and for worse.
• jmfldn 5y ago
  Absolutely not. My job title is "engineer" but compared to what my dad does, mechanical engineering, it's much more an art with bits of actual engineering and mathematical rigour sprinkled on top. I honestly think I should be called a developer and leave it at that. I don't think of myself as an engineer in all honesty.
  • chana_masala 5y ago
    I call myself an engineer so I stay in the family's grace :D My grandfather is a civil engineer, my father a systems engineer, so I am... a software engineer.
• satisfice 5y ago
  See Discussion of the Method by Billy Koen. He was a nuclear engineer. His definition of engineering was something like applying heuristics to solve problems.
• jrochkind1 5y ago
  Posted a year ago too -- and thanks for re-posting because I had been trying to remember the title/author of this to find it again and hadn't been able to find it! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25823907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25823907 (Yes, at first I saw Jan 18 2021 and thought it had been published yesterday; but it's 2022 now y'all!)
• mikewarot 5y ago
  Real, actual, Engineers in my home state of Indiana are required to graduate from an accredited 4 year education, and then pass a state administered test. The reason is simple, professional engineers work on things that would cause loss of life or grievous injury should they fail. Because of professional licensure, and all it entails, Engineers can give a hard NO to the wants and desires of management. Programmers will never have that kind of clout.
  • remus 5y ago
    > Programmers will never have that kind of clout. Why not? If you're writing software for a medical device giving a hard no to a feature request could be a very sensible course of action, and any sensibly managed company would listen carefully to that opinion.
  • Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    > Because of professional licensure, and all it entails, Engineers can give a hard NO to the wants and desires of management. Programmers will never have that kind of clout. Just because you have a PE license and you say "No", doesn't mean the firm contracting you will continue hiring you. In reality, engineers are under a lot of pressure to acquiesce to the demands of management (who is generally an engineer also due to regulations). This is why external auditors/inspectors come in and offer independent analysis. These _external auditors_ are not under the same organizational pressures that engineers in the firm/being contracted are. It has only somewhat to do with licensure and more to do with oversight.
• softwarebeware 5y ago
  I have a Master of Software Engineering degree. Ask me anything.
• graycat 5y ago
  Yes, the OP states a good question. My thought, going back some years, is that in some fields engineers work with strength of materials, e.g., what a steel I-beam will hold, and more generally work with, assemble, combine components with known properties. E.g., there are actual standards organizations that state the properties. In computing we have some of that -- components with known properties -- but not nearly enough. I'm drawn in part to the possible analogy with Lego blocks -- components can just snap together. This is a simple view, mostly because where we get to do engineering is small and where we don't, where the problems are, where we don't yet know how to do engineering, is large. Reading this thread, it looks like some others give more than my simple view here. But I cast my vote with those who also agree, with more evidence than I'm presenting here, that in computing we need more engineering. Once I did work with some people who wanted to regard a computing system as a network of queues and, then, apply queuing theory with, maybe, some probabilities and optimization. Supposedly they did apply such engineering to the design of an important I/O subsystem. So, that seems to have been an example of making software design engineering. In engineered systems, it is common to monitor the systems for correct behavior, and I was in a project trying to do the monitoring with just judgment and guesstimates, in particular, thresholds selected just intuitively on one variable at a time. Of course, thresholds on several variables, one at a time, have the geometrical region of normal performance always just a box. Well, we can't believe that normal performance is accurately a box. So with a small box, get a lot of false alarms and with a big one, poor detection rates. Bummer. Gee: Very commonly in monitoring, e.g., testing for a disease, we have for each test at least false alarm rate. We would also like detection rates. There is the famous, old Neyman-Pearson result on how to get the highest detection rate for any given false alarm rate. So, to do better than just judgment, I worked up a quite general test, with multi-dimensional data, including high dimensional, distribution-free, with known, adjustable false alarm rate and provable non-trivial detection rate. I published the thing. Soooo, that was a small step toward engineering for system monitoring. We need more engineering.
• davidhariri 5y ago
  I always felt (perhaps wrongly) that “Engineer” connotes some kind of a professional licensing process (P.Eng for example). I think the title would be more earned if software engineers had to agree to an oath and sign their work (somewhat accountable if harm is caused by negligence).
  • wheelinsupial 5y ago
    Since you use P.Eng. I'm assuming you're Canadian. Software engineer is a licensed P.Eng. in Canada. For example, BC: https://www.egbc.ca/Registration/Individual-Registrants/How-to-Apply/Professional-Membership-and-Licence/Engineer-First-Time-Applying-in-Canada/Software-Engineering-Applicants https://www.egbc.ca/Registration/Individual-Registrants/How-... There are a few exceptions to who can use the word "engineer" in a job, but software doesn't get the exception in Canada. E.g., https://www.peo.on.ca/public-protection/complaints-and-illegal-practice/report-unlicensed-individuals-or-companies-2#exceptions https://www.peo.on.ca/public-protection/complaints-and-illeg...
• trixie_ 5y ago
  Software defines an 'engine' that runs and does work. We build and maintain those engines therefore we are engineers.
• renewiltord 5y ago
  I think the more important question is whether tabs are better than emacs, or whether you should use BSD or vim.
• dnautics 5y ago
  I put software engineering as "can you write an sla and be legally liable for it?" If so, then you're an engineer. If not, you're a dev. I personally call myself a software plumber.
• nivertech 5y ago
  The word "engineer" has different etymologies in different languages. In English, this comes from the word "engine", which, in turn, from the Latin "ingenium" "talent, device." In Arabic and Hebrew, "engineering" and "geometry" are the same word "handasa". So an engineer is someone who draws blueprints, measures/validates them, and those blueprints are later used to create something. My guess is that it comes from the architects building the ancient Egyptian pyramids (a simple geometric shape). The first is more like craftsmanship, the second is more like modern engineering. Waterfall is Engineering Agile is Craftsmanship
• mikewarot 5y ago
  Real engineers can build a structure that with lifetimes of decades or more, with only minimal maintenance. Other than old Netware servers, when has anything computer related you've seen had an uptime measured in decades?
• decafninja 5y ago
  Where did the term "software engineer" originate? Early part of my career, working at non-tech companies, everyone was a "developer". Many years later, I was exposed to the world of Silicon Valley tech companies, where people were referring to themselves as "software engineers". Even now, at most non-tech companies the term "developer" is probably more widely used, though even these companies are now starting to switch to using "engineer". Most of the younger employees these non-tech companies hire use "engineer", but talking to the older veterans, they still refer to themselves as "developers" more often than not.
• jtmarmon 5y ago
  If you squint your eyes at all the statements people make about why SWE might not be engineering, it boils down to a "looseness". SWEs aren't precise, they ship bugs (as Scramblejams says in a sibling comment), they don't build to a spec, and rarely can they tell you all the ways the thing they're building can fail. Yet, as Hillel says in their post, 'Most people would agree that the software running on spacecraft counts as “real engineering”.'. I think looseness stems from three interrelated factors (1) potential complexity of a piece of software (2) the role complexity plays in causing faults (3) the fault tolerant nature of many domains in which software runs. (1) Potential complexity - literally the amount of logic branches - that can exist in a piece of software. If you were to compare the logic branches for a bridge, what would it be - 10? 100? if(load> X); if (temp > Y); etc... (2) The reality is you can hold a bridge (or the relevant variables[0]) in your head. Holding it in your head is necessary to be certain you can think through failure cases, or even know what cases to conduct/write tests for. When writing software, the branches can get so unbelievably high that it's basically impossible to hold the whole thing in your head. Even if you break apart and solidify each underlying abstraction in your system, a single user outcome may be composed of so many underlying abstractions that their interactions are impossible to predict. (3) Going back to the '"...software running on spacecraft counts as “real engineering”.' I think this is a not-loose example of SWE . The stakes are high, and accordingly, I'm certain a lead engineer on such a piece of software would do as much as possible to fully understand the entirety of the system so that it can be precisely tested. Get the number of irrelevant variables as high as possible, and keep the complexity of code as small as possible. OTOH, most software is low stakes. Even if you're dealing with money, transactions can be rolled back, payments refunded. There are rarely undoable mistakes, and even more rarely do those mistakes destroy the project (spacecraft) or kill a person. --- So in summary - I guess my point is: SWE is its own thing, in creating a world where complexity is orders of magnitude higher than in physical things. "Engineering"-ness operates on a plane of rigor, the high end of which contains only certain kinds of software. [0] I'd define an irrelevant variable as an abstraction that has zero possible implication for the logic branches of your project. For a bridge, this might be melting point of the steel (not a bridge guy, as you can tell); for a typical software project, this might be the OS.
• epolanski 5y ago
  > Do we deserve that title? You deserve it if you graduate in engineering. Otherwise you don't. People get offended when I express this idea for some reason but it would be considered absurd to call yourself an engineer in any other field but software without an engineering major. Anyway those titles are here to stay. Managers rebranded as vice presidents, secretaries become executive assistant, street cleaners are ecological operators and so on and on.
  • Swizec 5y ago
    After how many years of experience doing engineering work do you get to call yourself an engineer as a dropout? I ask because I'm pretty sure that after 15 years of on-the-job experience on top of 10 years of coding-for-fun experience I have more engineering skills than any fresh grad you can point at.
    • epolanski 5y ago
      You don't, you didn't graduate. Nobody cares how skilled someone is, in many countries, e.g. Italy where I live it would be illegal to give such a title to someone who isn't graduated in engineering. John Carmack who is one of the most brilliant minds we had in the last decades didn't graduate, he isn't an engineer. Only in software there is this ridiculous trend to rebrand as engineers. A car mechanic follows better engineering practices than every single dev I met, from data analysis to problem solving, no one would call him an engineer.
      • Warwolt 5y ago
        This seems incredibly political. How would you meaningfully define "engineering degree" without first defining what "engineering" is? And how would you define engineering in such a way that it excludes people learning it outside of some preferred institution? Of course you can learn engineering at the job.
• mannykannot 5y ago
  I have come to feel that the problem with comparing software development with established engineering disciplines is that doing so ignores the possibility that it is, or could be, a rather different discipline than we have seen heretofore. I do not have any insights into what a mature discipline of software engineering would look like, but I no longer feel there is much to be gained in debating comparisons between established engineering and software development.
• djcapelis 5y ago
  I don't think very many people can build or operate a siege engine so the real question for our modern times is: is anyone?
• JetAlone 5y ago
  I definitely feel more like some kind of tech scribe, where we now count and tabulate up the "rules" of the accounting, rather than being the instrument of data entry and accounting.
• danielam 5y ago
  Etymologically[0]: > mid-14c., enginour, "constructor of military engines," from Old French engigneor "engineer, architect, maker of war-engines; schemer" (12c.), from Late Latin ingeniare (see engine); general sense of "inventor, designer" is recorded from early 15c.; civil sense, in reference to public works, is recorded from c. 1600 but not the common meaning of the word until 19c (hence lingering distinction as civil engineer). Meaning "locomotive driver" is first attested 1832, American English. A "maker of engines" in ancient Greece was a mekhanopoios. The original meaning seems to characterize a very specific kind of activity and not what the broad genus "engineer" that we believe today suggests. The growing inclusiveness over time actually seems to suggest that the demarcation between "engineering" and "other arts" is an open question even when posed in historical contexts predating software. The problem of determining whether "software engineering" is engineering is not a problem unique to software development, I think, even putting to one side the numerous cases of what is arguably title puffery. The ancient Greek "mekhanopoios" is interesting because the ending, "-poios", from "poiesis", refers to making or producing. So the mekhanopoios is someone who produces machines; he does the production. The division of human activity (in relation to knowledge) into poiesis, praxis and theoria seems to give us a good starting point for understanding the myriad activities that human beings engage in because it is a principled classification. But "engineering" seems to have been appropriated for new uses over time for diverse, though not necessarily principled reasons (specialization, analogical similarity, a desire to cash in on established prestige). As a result, at least until the bad appropriations have been dispatched, maybe we cannot expect a crisp taxonomy because the evolution of the meaning of the term has not been principled in the first place. There does indeed seem to be a connotation of sophistication, specifically scientific sophistication, which is a question of methodology. Even if we accept this definition, sophistication is, of course, a matter of degree, not kind, and what counts as sophisticated seems to be relative to the state of the art. But you could then speak of degrees of engineering. Just as science that is more rigorous and thus more perfect could be said to be more scientific, so, too, we may speak of one field as more of an engineering field than another. So where does this leave software engineering? If engineering is understood in terms of productive aim achieved by means of scientifically-informed methods, then presumably software is the product, so it's a question of establishing the scientific basis for the field and identifying the "scientifically-informed methods". [0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/engineer#etymonline_v_25786 https://www.etymonline.com/word/engineer#etymonline_v_25786
• 29athrowaway 5y ago
  If you are using science and empirical knowledge to create technology and processes, you are an engineer. If you are simply using existing technologies and following existing processes without understanding the fundamental principles behind them, my preferred word for that is "technician". Technicians follow existing development processes, engineers create, validate and improve upon them.
• tWizzLer2 5y ago
  of course. look at the code base for a product like YouTube and then look at the product. there is no difference between looking at a bridge and the people driving on it.
• tWizzLer2 5y ago
• starky 5y ago
  Quite simply, as someone from a place where the term is protected, an Engineer is someone that is licensed by an engineering regulatory body. The more interesting discussion is what is engineering work. The best definition for engineering to me is: "the application of scientific principles to efficiently solve a unique problem". Which is something that most "software engineers" aren't doing, but by that same definition, most people with traditional engineering degrees aren't doing either, even if they are a licensed.
• a_square_peg 5y ago
  One thing that can be added - is this person working in a regulated industry? For instance, does your company have to follow a controlled design, manufacturing and verification process and have things documented properly along the way? Do you have to adhere to industry standard not because it's a good practice but because the law requires it? If not, I would say the work is likely not engineering. You can use Auto-CAD tool but there is a difference between 3D printing a spoon and designing a bridge. Likewise, just because one uses programming tools, it doesn't mean that the work is engineering.
• togaen 5y ago
  Why does this matter?
• photochemsyn 5y ago
  > "Consider chemical engineering. Chemical engineering is unlike mechanical, civil, or electrical engineering. Chemical engineers create processes to manufacture products at scale, often using experimentation and iteration. But nobody would disagree that it is engineering. Chemical engineering started in the late 1800s, before states licensed engineers. If chemical engineering started now, people would refuse to call it engineering. And they’d be wrong to refuse." This induced a little painful wincing. Chemical engineering relies heavily on detailed knowledge of fluid mechanics, because industrial chemical processes generally take place in liquid or gas phase, often under conditions of high pressure and temperature, and so you do indeed need the same kind of general approach that the other listed fields of engineering apply. They rely on mathematical models, to ensure that you don't get explosions (ideally anyway), etc. They need to be able to calculate things like the pressure at the bottom of an oil storage tank and so on. Look at any textbook on fluid mechanics for chemical engineers, it's the same kind of thing. The author may be thinking of something like organic chemists who work in tamer lab settings, devising new reactions at benchtop scale, but organic chemists generally aren't going to be able to scale up a promising benchtop process without the input of a chemical engineer who has a detailed knowledge of fluid mechanics. Nobody refers to such organic chemists as 'engineers' in my experience, I think the more generally accepted terms are 'researcher' or 'scientist'.
  • chiyc 5y ago
    You and the article are both right. Chemical engineering does rely on that knowledge, but plenty of it is done via experimentation. Process controls are largely developed through a lot of experimentation and data collection to understand how a process responds to various inputs. There was a great comment elsewhere about how engineering is about dealing with the unknowns and noise of the real world, which is why engineering requires empirical evidence to further refine or create those models. Engineers may use models to calculate estimates but it all needs to be backed up by data.
• bovermyer 5y ago
  Does it matter? Solve problems for people. Teach them how to solve bigger problems. Learn from them how to solve other problems. Make life better for people. I don't care if that's called "engineer," "developer," "codemonkey," or "hooman." Just do the thing, and try to always get better at doing the thing.
• vba616 5y ago
  I was startled recently to see someone on Twitter sneer at a certain celebrity for not being an engineer. I checked, and he seems to have a degree in physics, and a job title (which may not be accurate) that has the word "Engineer" in it. So, being tired of the debate about software developers, I'm wondering who else thinks that a physicist (by education) is not worthy of being called an engineer.
• wayeq 5y ago
  If I have to call my niece they/them, then you have to call me an Engineer.
• dd444fgdfg 5y ago
  It's not a taking anything away from us, to say we're not engineers. It would be helpful if engineering had a widely accepted succinct definition like the scientific method, but it doesn't. Building software is its own thing. It requires some engineering discipline. It requires some scientific method. It requires some artistic creativity. It requires operating efficiently within some community. It also (usually) does not require the rigor of engineering because it's ephemeral, and it doesn't require the proof of science because it's every changing, there is no truth. It's software, and that's not better or worse than engineering it's just different.
• analog31 5y ago
  I think engineering is an attitude. Disclosure: I'm not an engineer, but a scientist working among engineers. Historically, we got away with letting engineering be defined by the curricula and credentialing of the traditional engineering disciplines such as civil, electrical, and so forth. And by the cultures of companies that did engineering well. It was hard enough, and took long enough, that a shared culture tended to rub off on people without needing to define it. One tradition was that an "engineer" was qualified to approve a design, with some authority and responsibility for the outcome. Partly as a way to increase the number of engineers in the mid 20th century, engineering adopted an "engineering handbook" approach, where engineers learned how to choose and apply standard formulas for solving specific kinds of problems, such as sizing pipes, wiring, and so forth. More recently, this is being gradually replaced by the use of high level software tools such as electrical and mechanical modeling. Engineers are reluctant to let testing alone be a criterion for approval of a design. Software is too new to have such a history, and admits of a much wider variety of entry routes. It may be too early to know what software engineering consists of.
• djmips 5y ago
  We could be, and sometimes we are, but often we are not.
• bitwize 5y ago
  When Margaret Hamilton coined the term "software engineering", I believe she was thinking more along the lines of chemical engineering: whereas chemistry examines how chemicals work and maybe how to synthesize a given compound, chemical engineering is about designing processes to produce a chemical at scale so that it may be used in industry. And I think that's what software engineering should be about, if indeed there is such a field: the design of formalized processes that, when applied, can be used to write, deliver, deploy, maintain, and fix software at scale. I also think up to this point we've mainly been LARPing at software engineering. To really do it, we are going to need as a first step tools that give us stronger assurances that the software will function as needed at scale. Things like unit tests and Rust's borrow checker get us part of the way there but we will need better tools that give us stronger guarantees when it comes to integrating various components.
• galaxyLogic 5y ago
  I think "Software Engineering" should mean "The study of how to best develop software". That is different from "software development" which is the practice of developing software. Or you could say "software development" is applied Software Engineering. When you build a house the engineering part is designing the house and designing the processes how to build it. The rest is just the building-part which is not really engineering. In software you could say there is little difference between designing software and actually writing software. But the subtle difference is that whatever makes it GENERALLY easier to develop software is "engineering". Engineering is a study of how to do things, not the actual doing of things. So I would say that someone who writes a compiler, or reusable library, is a software engineer when they are doing that. But if they are just writing code they are equivalent to a construction worker, not an engineer. You can of course be both, at different times.
• Ericson2314 5y ago
  I think Hillel Wayne needs to go further down this trajactory. Focusing on the classification individual workers is myopic. The fact is, the computing industry in the US arose during a huge wave of deindustrialization and offshoring. It has grown up in a completely different economic context. This, more than anything intrinisic to the field, influences the norms. This macro perspective must be the starting point.
• brisky 5y ago
  It depends what kind of programming you do if it can be called engineering or not. Most of software development is not engineering. The core difference in my mind is that engineering implies transferring abstracted design to physical reality (you have to understand physical limitations and constraints to do that). Programming most of the time is producing abstraction mechanisms that are quite detached from physical objects. A good comparison would be 3D modeling and sculpting. When sculpting you have to understand the properties of the stone and tools, but in 3D world almost anything is possible. If you can imagine - you can do it. https://tautvilas.medium.com/engineering-free-programming-is-the-future-of-software-development-c892a6c8e3b1 https://tautvilas.medium.com/engineering-free-programming-is...
• paganel 5y ago
  15+ years into the job I still, most of the time, call myself a "computer programmer", i.e. I program computers to do some stuff, most of the times to move some data around. But maybe people on the dev-ops side are more on the "engineering" side, I wouldn't know.
• torginus 5y ago
  I have 2 acquaintances, one is a Graphic Designer, the other is an Electrical Engineer who models and designs power grid controls. The Graphic Designer stated out her career designing advertising material and magazine layouts and websites in Photoshop. Nowadays she has transitioned to using CSS/HTML directly, and then to React. The other guys core competency is power distribution systems and modelling distributed control systems. He started using Matlab to help with his calculations, and develop computer models. The company he works for pivoted to selling grid modelling software, so he rewrote the models he did in Java. Nowadays if you went on LinkedIn, both would have the title "Software Engineer". Both write code, but I'd argue that their core competencies are still entirely different.
  • DoingIsLearning 5y ago
    Not disagreeing but in a lot of jurisdictions the Graphic Designer would not be able to use the Engineer title.
    • torginus 5y ago
      I mean, she is a frontend dev by all accounts - in most places, sadly, engineer is not a protected title - and colloquially people refer to frontend people as software engineers.
• jpochtar 5y ago
  Is a lawyer an engineer? Hillel asks engineer-turned-swes whether they think swe is engineering. He should compare that rate to the rate lawyer-turned-swes think swe is similar to law. Without comparing rates, you might include swe in engineering by an overbroad definition of engineering. Also if you think engineering is whether the state has granted you a license: 1) cope, 2) since lawyers need a JD, they’re definitely engineers right? Personally, I think we appropriated the term eng in the mid-90s to up the social status of programmers. Nothing wrong with that, but FAANG SWEs make substantially more than trad engineers now, so we should aim higher.
• andsens 5y ago
  In Denmark we have a term that circumvents this issue completely. It was coined by Peter Naur in 1966: “Datalogi”. The discipline of understanding and working on data. I think it encapsulates the core of the profession really well while avoiding overlap with other disciplines.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• softwarebeware 5y ago
  The statement about math is inaccurate: > [Standard engineering] is where we work over a continuous domain, like real numbers. Things like calculus, trigonometry, and differential equations are in this category. This is what most people in the US learn in high school, codifying it as what they think of as “math”. > In software, we don’t use these things, leading to the conception that we don’t use math. But we actually use discrete math ... It is false to say that we never work over a continuous domain in software. We have continuous domains in software all the time whether its audio-related software, self-driving cars, networking, or many other examples. And we definitely _also_ have to use discrete math alongside these continuous domains.
• edmcnulty101 5y ago
  What makes an tech person an 'engineer' is being competent with data structures and algorithms and other classical computer science subjects. They can work on high difficulty 'engineering' problems. A developer uses libraries with that stuff already made for them and is limited by the available tools but can still get a lot done.