* The New Plague
* Have Fun at Work
* Friends in High Places
* Design for Prevention
What's next, Software Physician?
With all due respect, if your "engineering title" is preceded by the word salesforce or prompt, you're not an engineer.
No seriously that kind of gate keeping is just ridiculous.
Genuine question, I am not an engineer nor in any sort of role that could plausibly be considered engineering.
Building a house takes engineering (e.g. structural). It also takes carpenters and plumbers and so on. What’s fun about software is you get to do all of it on one project.
Words mean things, and if we want to consider "software engineer" as anything more than title inflation, it should mean more than just a programmer who's full of themselves.
If I shit out a webapp that's crashes if you look at it funny, that shouldn't be considered software engineering because it's a pile of shit that barely works.
If I make a webapp that actually gives useful error messages to users and is robust in the face of failure and is maintainable and someone else would want to touch my code, then we're starting to get somewhere.
Let's be honest, the main reason so many people glom on to the term "engineer" is because (as others have mentioned) the rigorous processes around licensing for other engineering disciplines keeps supply low, which attaches an inherent market value to the term. People then adopt the term without justification in the hope if nets them a pay raise. We ought to accept that it's OK not to be an engineer. Other professions are also valuable. It's also important to "gatekeep" meanings of words to a certain extent lest we think it wise to accept a language in which any word can mean anything.
The engineers working on aviation software and other low-level, real-time, performance critical systems probably need to use quite a bit of maths and are closest to doing what we traditionally consider engineering.
All those teams working on web apps and advertising...yeah not really. This isn't to say what they do isn't complicated or difficult, but it's not really engineering in the classical sense insofar as it doesn't (typically) require the use of continuous mathematics and deep systems theory. If you're primarily writing systems design docs and performing calculations, you're probably doing some kind of engineering. If you're mostly writing code to spec you're just programming. It's sort of akin to a carpenter calling themselves an engineer.
But hey, this is all symptomatic of a general trend here in the states of the trivialization and devaluing of expertise; people think it's fair to identify as whatever their heart desires regardless of qualification, knowledge, or experience. A world in which people regularly accept advice from total randos on social media is not one that has any strong sense of value around knowledge or critical capacity.