Common misconception, but Software Engineer is actually a licensed profession in many states (with vague industry exemptions): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_professio...

But virtually nobody does it. The NCEES even abandoned their Software Engineer licensing exam a few years ago because nobody was taking it.

Lightly glancing it seems like there are hard requirements for a college education for some of these. That’s a hard-stop for many (including myself.)

Even if you had a degree, working in this field should teach you it's not a requirement.

This does not deserve to be downvoted. A degree is secondary to actual talent. Too many students in my graduating class were undeserving of their degree, and plenty of folks can do the job without it.

yeah, that's fine. You should call yourself a software developer (or, as I call myself, a software plumber). An software engineer, minimally IMO, is someone who can 1) produce a software BOM, and 2) can craft an SLA. I can maybe do 1, and can't do 2. So, I don't call myself a software engineer.

> Software Engineer is actually a licensed profession in many states

Last time I looked, I couldn't find any. Some states tried for a while, but I think they all gave up.

In Europe being an engineer has civil accountability on issues.

You can be fined really high if you hire a self-called engineer without a proper degree. Or at least decades of alleged experience in the field.

Well, yes, this applies to engineering. But not to software engineering.

Personally, I like „software engineering“ as it is — being a free profession where talent counts more than a degree.

The degree is part of the training of an engineer, not the professional designation itself. The challenge with our current understanding of the title software engineer is that practitioners are not held to the same standards and responsibilities as other engineering fields. It doesn't have anything to do with talent.

You can only be held to some standards if there exist a common set of standards that the entire industry can agree on. This is impossible for software.

* not held to any standards and responsibilites.

FTFY.

Cynically, Me.

> talent counts more than a degree

Are you saying for MD or PE that talent doesn't matter?

Anybody can say they are a software engineer. The title means nothing.

Yes. A degree matters much more than talent. If you can get a degree you can practice. The most talented person in the world with no degree can't.

Some people go to places where their low talent but high cash flow allows them to get a license.

Okay, so for an MD a degree is necessary that's true. But an MD with a degree and no talent probably won't be an MD for long.

MD at least means something. "Software engineer" means nothing.

Once you are an MD unless you challenge powerful forces in your association or hospital you are free to practice bad medicine as long as you can stay within some reasonable guidelines around billing and when to order tests. This gets exposed with surgery but is a lot easier with a GI doctor.

They both mean something. You have to dive in to get the real scope regardless. If you just need a title for your commerical MD would carry more weight around diet products and a developer around a new software offering.

There are a lot of incurious paint-by-numbers doctors in the US. Doing your job by rote won't get you fired.

Oddly enough, I don't think I'd care to visit a medical professional whose sole virtue was talent. I'd kinda prefer some knowledge and skill, too.

It surely does, e.g. in Portugal you can't even name a Software Engineering degree without approval from the Order.

You are not required to do the exam, provided there is no civil liability or signing projects as the legally responsible Software/Informatics Engineering.

>Well, yes, this applies to engineering. But not to software engineering.

Good luck with that here.

What's talent got to do with it?

Especially without the accountability. Call yourself a software engineer? Did your code break? Is it vulnerable to exploits? What was the damage? Did you ship it knowing it was not fit for public usage? Congratulations! you're no longer allowed to program for a living and the state is suing you and your employer for damages.

I think part of the problem is that compared to more traditional forms of engineering, software engineering is still really young and not as rigorous. Right now, _nobody_ can write code without any bugs it in whatsoever. If we banned people who wrote buggy code, pretty soon we'd have no software engineers left. Regardless of whether you think that's a good idea, it seems pretty clear that at the very least there is a lot of demand for programmers, so it's unlikely the industry would get behind limiting that further in such a drastic way.

> If we banned people who wrote buggy code

That's not the standard for any kind of engineering. Professional Engineers make errors all the time. But they also design systems with fail safes, redundancies, safety factors, etc... You design systems with the expectation that failures will happen. Users will do stupid things. Highly improbably sequences will probably happen.

Not all code needs to be designed so carefully. Nobody cares if Hacker News is offline for a few hours. But the software systems in self driving cars or running an MRI machine probably should be designed by licensed professionals who can stand up to their bosses and say "this can't ship until these improvements are made" because if it does ship, they can be personally sued for malpractice and lose their license.

The issue is not banning, rather lack of liability.

Even the cook at the bistro on the corner is liable if the food, cleaning or refrigeration isn't as it is supposed to be

> In Europe being an engineer has civil accountability on issues. You can be fined really high if you hire a self-called engineer without a proper degree.

One more case of mistakenly presenting 'Europe' as an homogenous entity, whereas it depends on countries like anywhere else.

In France anyone can claim an engineer position, it is not licensed. You just cannot tell you hold an engineer degree if you haven't one; and that's pretty theoretical, because basically nobody uses the proper formal title (unlike for example in Germany where they always use the words Dipl. Ing.), so you can always fall back on claiming you are talking about the position and not the degree title.

Looks like they stopped offering exam to license people: https://www.nspe.org/resources/pe-magazine/may-2018/ncees-en...

It has been many years since After The Gold Rush was published and we are no closer today than we were then. At some point software engineering will be a real profession but I doubt anyone will take action before some huge catastrophe pushes the issue.

I don't like the idea of gatekeeping, it's hard enough to hire people.

In the US we don't really have licensing for engineers (there is PE, but it's not anything close to ubiquitous). I think it's one of the best parts of our engineering/tech culture.

You're an engineer based on the skills you employ to solve the problems you do, not because some body of people gave you a slip of paper that says you can employ those skills to solve those problems.

Gatekeeping in the software industry is a surefire way to slow down innovation. Software would stop eating the world, or only take a bite every couple of decades.

Sure because there is no innovation across the engineering fields.

The best of innovators have the same thing to offer regardless of formal credentials.

A big difference is whether or not this is well recognized, and by whom and/or at their own peril.

In the US, PE has made it so the word “engineer” is legally protected, like “doctor”. No one enforces it for software, so I wonder if it’s even enforceable anymore. But the law is there.

In some fields of engineering PE is pretty nonexistent. Some people come from other degrees (like math, physics) and call themselves engineer without difficulty. But engineering fields require a much more narrow and deep set of skills. generally the key classes to learn those skills come at the end of three or four years of prerequisite classes, so it's a pretty high barrier to starting without doing the degree.

In programming you can learn your way to advanced skills while getting paid. Once you know roughly one class worth of basics there's valuable contributions you can make, at least if you are decent at figuring things out on a computer.

Hate using this preface, but, unpopular opinion follows: The issue in the US is that the word engineer has been in common use to describe technical workers for a very long time. I've had friends who were:

* Engineers (and operated trains) * Manufacturing Engineers (who were really equipment techs) * Sanitary Engineers (who were really trash truck drivers) * UX Engineers (who were really web designers) * Software engineers (programmers) * Data Engineers (kind of dba-ish, maybe) * Culinary Engineer (restaurant kitchen designer)

Genericide has occurred. The boat sailed.

When the real estate industry wanted a word for "licensed seller of property" they had to make up a new word "Realtor" and protect that with a certification mark. The engineering industry really needs to do the same thing instead of harrassing the garbage truck driver, computer programmers and the guy who fixes the conveyor belt.

This is heavily dependent on the field and state. PEs are quite rare outside civil engineering.

Not enforceable. Or at least entirely winnable in court. Such a victory happened recently in Oregon:

https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-li...

TL;DR: such restrictions violate your freedom of speech.

I think you are right and it's too bad. There are some fields that should have it.

For example, the software for self-driving cars should be signed off by a licensed engineer before it is allowed to go live. Many mechanical and electrical parts of the car have been designed by licensed professionals, why not the software?

One can verify and sign off on computations that approximate the physics or chemistry that will occur in a structure or machine, as a well established chain of procedures exist to go from crude formulaic approximations to micro or, if necessary, nano-scale simulations of electrical, mechanical, and chemical processes, and we know what to look for.

I don't think the same is true for software "engineering," as it seems that all possible forms of process can be subverted and cargo-culted, from agile methods down to code checking. Certainly there is room to remedy some shortcomings, but SWE definitely is the engineering discipline least based in physical fact.

The physics behind simulating the buckling of a structure is always the same, we can just choose more or less crude approximations of it, but SWE in general seems a lot more diverse. I can implement that simulation in assembly or some scripting language, and attach various bits and pieces to it to manage users and data; deploy it across the cloud if need be. But, there isn't a singular, time-invariant optimal path to achieving that, and what is true today may not be true tomorrow. One can work off basic principles, like the Agile Manifesto, but how can you quantify or even certify this shifting landscape?

Having studied both mechanical and software engineering at uni, I feel that you _can_ make the parallel between the two. It's just that in mechanical engineering we've converged a lot more over time. Out of convention and need for accountability much more than necessity. For example, for mechanical calculations we have converged on using mostly the same algebraic notation (never mind having minor differences here and there, such as in vector notation). Having an obscene amount of different notations, some so different that they are for the most part unintelligible to half the engineers out there, that would be unthinkable in ME, but is the norm in SE.

The _physics_ of a buckling structure may be always the same. But already the modelling techniques are far from obvious consensus: Do you do it analytically? Do you use FEM? BEM? Then there are a bunch of simulation techniques, i.e. for numerical integration, which you could use, much like you could use functional or imperative programming or OOP or whatever else.

So if we were to behave more like the _software_ branch of the engineering discipline in general, then we'd have a _much_ tighter space of languages that would be at all acceptable for any work deemed critical, like medical, administrative or aeronautical software.

I agree you can make software rigorous like in ME. The part which is hard is that debugging or proving properties about a program is much more difficult than writing the program. These costs are currently hard to amortize over multiple projects. Real-time systems have some of these facets (e.g., spacecraft).

For example, a memory allocator can be studied in the usual algorithmic sense or perhaps how they impact the stability of the system under randomized load. Can you prove the system remains stable? Yeah. Is it worth it when you can reboot machines and add some heuristics? No.

Currently, the big places which are getting any attention for verification of functionality are embedded applications and OS kernels. Even then, the depth of verification is limited to common bug categories.

> Many mechanical and electrical parts of the car have been designed by licensed professionals, why not the software?

Maybe some companies have some internal requirement for that, but generally speaking that's not true. Legal requirements for review and approval by a PE only apply to building drawings.

> At some point software engineering will be a real profession

I'm rooting for the same, finally we will earn like management /s

But you can be considered a software engineer by your peers, usually demonstrated through qualification and professional experience.

The differentiation I was trying to draw with those two words is: I don't know if they're actually working software developers or people who just hack on code in their free time. If they're professional devs, that's obviously much worse.

Honestly, not the part of that I was expecting to have to discuss.

Engineer is a legal term in some place where a degree is required in engineering.

The term developer doesn't require a license neither does CEO or board member or president of the US.