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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 rig

by 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.

by belval 5y ago

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.