Why do people (many software engineers) insist on putting down software engineering like this? I see things like "bad" languages being popular and instances like leftpad cited, as if other disciplines never have clunky standards or silly incidents.
One of the biggest things that comes to mind for me is that in software engineering a junior engineer can legally build, deploy, and launch a critical project.
In other engineerings, projects require sign-off from a licensed (P.Eng in Canada) engineer. And the engineer that signs off on that project is the one held liable for its success or failure.
Personally, I've loved software engineering for the above as it's let me grow my career much more easily, but I do think of it as a stark difference in engineering and "software engineering".
Except in my experience this rarely happens. Maybe your experiences are different?
You're also potentially forgetting something: if their software breaks down it's very, very unlikely to cause a death. There are far, far, far, far fewer cases in which software engineering failures have resulted in death versus, say, structural engineering.
Building a bridge that takes people over a river? Better get that right...
Building LinkedIn? Let's hope we get it right but if we don't, some people get mildly annoyed and the share holders lose their money. It's not quite the same impact, but still downtime isn't ideal.
EDIT: Apologies for being so crude in my original wording. I'm updating the comment to reflect a more professional, civil tone.
EDIT: Apologies to all. This isn't the right attitude for HN and I'll refrain from this kind of behavior in the future.
When people say "actual engineers", they're talking about features like:
* codified best practices for at least 90% of the job (software development does a bit of this, but still precious little, and it's so immature that a lot of codified best practices (e.g. "use OO for everything") are clearly wrong) * certification, with standards, where it's possible to do a bad enough job that you lose your certification (also true of e.g. doctors or lawyers). that cannot happen in S.E. because there's no certification in the first place. * jobs with sufficient consequences (e.g. bridges, buildings, electrical work...) are illegal to build without sign-off by a sufficiently senior sufficiently-certified engineer. that isn't the case in S.E., there's no law against a high school student building a site that records PII and then leaks it * if an engineer signs off on such a job, and is sufficiently negligent in doing so, not only do they lose certification but they can be legally responsible. as far as I know this is in theory just as possible in S.E., but as far as I know has never happened in practice, while it does from time to time happen in other fields * part of the aforementioned certification is training in questions of law, ethics, and professional liability, whereas most CS students take at most a course on "social consequences" in the hand-wavy abstract, and most "software engineers" didn't do a CS degree anyway
It used to be the case that the word for the super-category here was "professional" (as in "member of a professional association"), but these days people use "professional" just to mean "wears nice clothes and doesn't cuss". Shrug. (btw it's fine that the meaning changed, because a still-older meaning of "profession" is purely religious, so using it for these kinds of training/trades usages is already a "distortion".) But anyway, as I noted above, doctors and lawyers and accountants all share most of these properties, they are far from exclusive to engineers.
I think there are good reasons why software engineering isn't currently real engineering. E.g. civil engineering (one of the oldest types of engineering) muddled along okay without any of these features for thousands of years, and many of these features are effectively impossible in a field as fast-moving (i.e. young) as software. So I'm not necessarily saying that S.E. could reasonably aim for those features in the near future.
But still. Real engineering is a thing, and software engineering isn't real engineering. Yet.
Dictionaries aren't perfect but Merriam's definitions closely capture what I think of as engineering really well:
2a : the application of science and mathematics by which the properties of matter and the sources of energy in nature are made useful to people
b : the design and manufacture of complex products
Programs obviously aren't made of physical matter but it's otherwise fitting.
But many things fit that Merriam's definition, and are not engineering. Since you were so honest as to note that dictionaries aren't perfect, I don't want to be a jerk about how useless that definition is, but since you went on to say that software seems to fit, let's just look at some examples of just how excessively inclusive that definition is.
(I'll assume that 2a means "matter and/or energy", because if it means "matter and also energy" then clearly software doesn't qualify anyway.)
Knitting fits those definitions perfectly. Science, yes, mathematics, yes, properties of matter, yes, useful to people, yes, design and manufacture of complex products, yes. Are you claiming that knitting is engineering?
Filmmaking manipulates matter and energy, creates a thing that is useful to people, and involves complex design and complex manufacture.
Music composition depends on math and science, manipulates sources of energy in nature, is useful to people, and involves the design of products (although composition doesn't involve the manufacture of those products; we call that manufacture "performance").
Accounting doesn't worry about "properties of matter and energy" (much as software doesn't, as you point out), but it involves the application of mathematics to create things useful to people, and there's often the design and manufacture of complex (informational) products. (Note that I'm not saying that clerical work fits the definition, I'm saying that the design of accounting processes fits the definition. Obviously many "accountants" are not designing processes but are simply doing bookkeeping, in the same way that a rivetter is not an engineer.)
Compared to any of these, software creation involves no science, typically little mathematics (although there are certainly very deep exceptions to that, haha), and doesn't involve any manufacture. If you're gonna put software creation in the club, you're basically saying that "engineering is creation stuff (including non-physical stuff"). No one agrees with that concept.
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That has all been arguably a bit of an over-reaction to the details of your argument, so I want to just return here to my core point. Yes, certification and sign-off and ethics and liability and law and culture is arguably a less-essential characteristic of engineering than something to do with making stuff. But in this day and age, the certification and ethics and sign-off and so on is a necessary part of what makes it engineering. And it's one of the main reasons that software engineering as practices isn't real engineering. Yet.
That or this? And I don't believe it does. Also no, "actual" engineers don't still (universally) operate in a master/apprentice model. I've heard of that happening in quite some time.
> Look to actual (not software) engineers for that.
This is putting down software engineers who are, by definition of engineering solutions, real engineers. They're just simply not in regulated markets.
> There is also a deep misunderstanding of what the Internet is. It's not a "third dimension" or a set of marketing hype. It is an engineering marvel.
Which part of the article said the Internet was a marketing hype? I think you may have taken the term "third dimension" a bit too literally here. The author didn't mean what you thought they meant.
> This "pyramid of mastery" is roughly as sensible as organizing your bookshelf by color.
Networking fundamentals come before learning to use AWS VPC peering or VPNs, which are tools and frameworks. You learn one before you learn the other. I think the structure is valid.
EDIT: Apologies for being so crude in my original wording. I'm updating the comment to reflect a more professional, civil tone.
There is also a deep misunderstanding of what the Internet is. It's not a "third dimension" or a set of marketing hype. It is an engineering marvel. Which again drives home that the author has no grounding in engineering.
This "pyramid of mastery" is roughly as sensible as organizing your bookshelf by color. It might please the eye of a layman, but makes no sense to the knowledgeable. There is no sense of sweep and scope of concepts and instead everything is labelled by size of something a novice can easily identify. Never mind that this shape would be an inverted pyramid given the current taxonomy and concept of size, it just doesn't make sense as a path toward mastery.
Then there is cyclic learning, not drawn because apparently it would spoil the oversimplified diagrams.
I don't understand this piece. It's not trying to sell me anything. If it were, it would be better designed to a purpose. For charity's sake, I'll choose to believe it's an apprentice's draft, a first effort at prose.