Comment by altmanaltman
13 hours ago
So are you okay with actual engineers having a problem with the term used in software since you support gatekeeping? Engineer is a term that was used far before software was a thing. So if you support gatekeeping, you should let engineering refer to "actual work" not "code" and find a new term that doesn't engulfs the "original meaning".
Or just accept terms change as society and technology does.
> Engineer is a term that was used far before software was a thing. So if you support gatekeeping, you should let engineering refer to "actual work" not "code"
This is so jumbled. You mean to say that before software, all work was physical? Nah, engineers spent and spend a lot of time at the drawing board, too. It's just that they're not sitting at the plastic table with a sticker of a dog with a toolbox on it.
If you don't follow rules and practices that are external to you and your employer, as you might in aviation or nuclear reactor software, there's not even a chance it's engineering. It can be "software engineering", sure, just the same way "software architect" is not an "architect".
https://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/Software-Engineering-ex...
> NCEES will discontinue the Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) Software Engineering exam after the April 2019 exam administration. Since the original offering in 2013, the exam has been administered five times, with a total population of 81 candidates.
If you don't want the same rigor, if you can't handle the same rigor, you don't get the same respect. Because you don't deserve it.
>> NCEES will discontinue the Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) Software Engineering exam after the April 2019 exam administration. Since the original offering in 2013, the exam has been administered five times, with a total population of 81 candidates.
>> If you don't want the same rigor, if you can't handle the same rigor, you don't get the same respect. Because you don't deserve it.
It's an interesting opinion, but the reason nobody took the exam is that, unlike other PE disciplines, there are no jurisdictions with legal requirement to hold a PE license to write software.
For example, here for a building to be constructed, the plans need to be approved by a licensed PE if it's above a certain height and footprint. Note that you only need one PE to approve, not that all engineers working on the design have to hold PE licenses.
That's just your opinion. If you support gatekeeping, you support retaining the original meaning of words. The original meaning of engineering did not include software.
So it is a contradiction if you support gatekeeping but also only when its convinient to you.
That is the point I am making.
It doesn't have to be that binary. The important part of the meaning is the rigor and responsibility, not the field. Actual engineering has expanded to new fields multiple times.
And if the "convenient to you" point is also supposed to apply to me, nope not at all. My programming would not qualify.
check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer
> A professional engineer is competent by virtue of his/her fundamental education and training to apply the scientific method and outlook to the analysis and solution of engineering problems. He/she is able to assume personal responsibility for the development and application of engineering science and knowledge, notably in research, design, construction, manufacturing, superintending, managing, and in the education of the engineer. His/her work is predominantly intellectual and varied and not of a routine mental or physical character.
[..]
> His/her education will have been such as to make him/her capable of closely and continuously following progress in his/her branch of engineering science by consulting newly published works on a worldwide basis, assimilating such information, and applying it independently. He/she is thus placed in a position to make contributions to the development of engineering science or its applications. His/her education and training will have been such that he/she will have acquired a broad and general appreciation of the engineering sciences as well as thorough insight into the special features of his/her own branch.
If programmers can't be bothered, if their employers don't want that, either (if not even less), and yet you say times just magically change, so now people who don't fit that description get called engineers -- how do you call those who do fit that description, who still do those things? "Real engineers"? "Classic engineers?" I don't even care, but you gotta have something, you can't just pretend the real, practical, night and day difference between these things doesn't exist.
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