Neither myself nor the vast majority of other “software engineers” in our field are living up to what it should mean to be an “engineer”.
The people that make bridges and buildings, those are the engineers. Software engineers, for the very very most part, are not.
“Developers build things. Engineers build them and keep them running.”
I like the linguistic point from a standpoint of emphasizing a long term responsibility.
https://www.howtheworldbecamerich.com/
Edit-on a related note, are there any studies on the all-in long-term cost between companies that "develop" vs. "engineer". I doubt there would be clean data since the managers that ignored all of the warning of "tech debt" would probably have the say on both compiling and releasing such data.
Does the cost of "tech-debt" decrease as the cost of "coding" decreased or is there a phase transition on the quality of the code? I bet there will be an inflection point if you plotted the adoption time of AI coding by companies. Late adapters that timed it after the models and harnesses and practices were good enough (probably still some time in the near future) would have less all-in cost per same codebase quality.
In software there's a lot more emphasis on post-hoc fixes rather than up front validation, in my experience.
"Software engineering is what happens to programming when you add time and other programmers."
Most recently I wrote cloudformation templates to bring up infra for AWS-based agents. I don't use ai-assisted coding except googling which I acknowledge is an ai summary.
A friend of mine is in a toxic company where everyone has to use AI and they're looked down upon if they don't use it. Every minute of their day has to be logged doing something. They're also going to lay off a bunch of people soon since "AI has replaced them" this is in the context of an agency.
Of course, we use that term for something else in the software world, but architecture really has two tiers, the starchitects building super fancy stuff (equivalent to what we’d call software architects) and the much more normal ones working on sundry things like townhomes and strip malls.
That being said I don’t think people want the architecture pay grades in the software fields.
Maybe software tinkerer?
You should see the code that scientists write...
We're engineers.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer#Definition
2. https://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/cr...