[HN Gopher] Programmers: Stop Calling Yourselves Engineers (2015)
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Programmers: Stop Calling Yourselves Engineers (2015)
Author : amichail
Score : 20 points
Date : 2021-05-14 20:00 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| mk81 wrote:
| No.
| karamanolev wrote:
| I think the points they're making are all valid and I share the
| concerns outlined, but I disagree more than I agree.
|
| Bridges have collapsed, buildings have failed, but that happens
| less than software crashes. Why is that? I think the most
| important differentiator is the tolerance for such failures.
| Software is written cheaply, quickly and fails more often because
| we can afford it to. If we could afford the same thing with
| buildings, they'd be made quickly and cheaply, but our societal
| tolerance for that is much lower.
|
| I posit that software can be made to the same high standards as
| buildings or bridges, but it would have to be much simpler and/or
| way more expensive. So why not call software developers
| engineers? Just like structural engineers, we have to meet a
| quality bar set by mostly external circumstances. Is it the lack
| of industry certification? That would've happened, if the
| consequences of failing to meet the bar were the same or worse.
| seumars wrote:
| The thing is, buildings are being built cheaply but most people
| can't afford to make a different choice:
| https://twitter.com/dreamboatslim/status/1382282414374932482
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Software flaws are more abstract and hard to detect. While a
| material crack will show on an X-ray image, a security flaw in
| an authentication code may be subtle enough that no tool will
| be able to highlight it.
| detaro wrote:
| I don't think that is a good distinction. Mechanical
| engineering was engineering long before it had todays tools
| and understanding of material (which is constantly
| expanding). Software engineering is driving forward the
| equivalent developments, but is just younger as a field.
|
| Software development as a field does struggle with adopting
| these tools, but I think that's a matter of degree, not
| fundamental.
|
| The roles are not as cleanly defined yet, what counts as
| engineering work and what as "just" implementation.
| alboy wrote:
| Exactly, nobody makes a fuss about packaging engineers because
| the milk cartons they design cannot stop shrapnel. Making a
| design that is good enough for the users' expectations while
| being significantly faster and cheaper to manufacture than the
| alternative ones is what engineers do.
| dasil003 wrote:
| I think the most important differentiator is that the function
| of a bridge is extremely simple, a good design has very clear
| success criteria, and the materials and physics underlying them
| do not change. That's not to say it's easy, but rather that
| we've had thousands of years of practice and refinement without
| moving the goal posts.
|
| Contrast with software: Many large software projects fail to
| even achieve a coherent and feasible high-level spec of what
| the system needs to do, let alone how all the details will
| work. Once you get past that phase, you find that the actual
| design and build of software systems relies on so many layers
| of abstraction that practitioners have to make a lot of
| assumptions in order to get anything done. In practice it works
| because we tend to keep the lower levels stable and coalesce
| around a relatively small number of proven stacks, but unlike
| the hard engineers knowledge of materials and physics, the
| actual platforms are all human defined and subject to change.
| Imagine how civic engineering would work if physics were just
| code written by humans that never stopped monkeying with it.
| [deleted]
| unanswered wrote:
| There are certainly people in the industry who are not qualified
| to be called "engineer"; whose job involves programming only. But
| there are others who are.
| geebee wrote:
| Should "sound engineers" in recording studios drop the title?
| "special effects engineers" in film production? Should the
| academy awards do away with the "scientific and engineering
| achievement award"?
|
| If there were legitimate confusion about software engineers, I'd
| see the problem. If people who aren't licensed professional
| engineers are claiming they are, of if people are reading a book
| on SQL and PHP and hanging out a shingle as a structural
| engineer, then ok. But "engineer" is a very widespread term to
| describe the ingenious (Ingenieur, Ingenium, Engineer)
| application of design, technology, science, and mathematics to
| real world problems. That is probably the _primary_ use of the
| term.
| modshatereality wrote:
| When did computers stop being deterministic? Just because your
| mainstream PC-OS is no longer a sane piece of engineering doesn't
| mean the entire field is lost.
| darepublic wrote:
| I never got an engineering degree. I think of programming at my
| level more like plumbing than engineering. I am a software
| plumber.
| david-gpu wrote:
| I still find this sentiment hurtful after all these years. It
| comes across as demeaning of my credentials and my work.
|
| Let's start with my degree. My master's degree reads "Informatics
| Engineer", a title that was approved at the national level by the
| EU country where I graduated. That alone should be sufficient in
| my opinion.
|
| Degrees don't matter? What about people? When the exact work I do
| is performed by "true Engineers" then does that make it true
| enfineering? Most of my co-workers are Electronics Engineers and
| while they perform the same tasks I do, I have yet to see anybody
| question their worth.
|
| Or perhaps my colleagues may be true Engineers, but the work they
| are doing is mere programming, as evidenced by a simple
| programmer like me doing it.
|
| Maybe it's the processes we follow that matter. True engineering
| work involves design, documentation and review processes, after
| all. Well, the processes we follow come directly from EE best
| practices because that's the nature of the work we do (computer
| architecture). Software engineering also has its own similar
| design processes tailored to their needs. Not significantly
| different, I must say.
|
| Maybe it's not the accreditation, the people or the processes.
| Perhaps the demarcation between engineering and programming is in
| the systems we design. They must be designs worthy of being
| patented, systems so important that people's lives are at risk if
| they malfunction.
|
| I have a dozen patents -- none of them in software. I have worked
| on safety critical systems where death and dismemberment were
| expected consequences of malfunction. Importantly, not all "true
| engineers" work on safety critical systems either.
|
| What else, then? The article talks about certification -- I wish
| they allowed us to become licensed so that we had less
| competition and higher software engineering standards.
| atoav wrote:
| As a programmer who does a lot of electrical engineering as
| well: It is not completly out there to question whether
| programmers are really engineers.
|
| When I want to do the electrical wiring for a house there are
| close to 2000 norms each stuffed with formula and details, that
| I have to get right or I will have to fear the consequences.
|
| When I write software it is more like "Lol this framework looks
| interesting, lets try it together with that code from
| coolcoder1982 on GitHub".
|
| I know there _are_ programmers who try very hard to specify and
| write _good_ software, with formal correctness, tests and so
| on. And maybe those would be closest to the term "engineer",
| but there are so many people who just aren't, that the whole
| field suffers.
|
| When something went wrong due to a software error for the past
| 3 decades it was (and still is) usually excused as if nobody
| could have done something to prevent it. Software error. Oh
| god. Nothing we can do. Jikes.
|
| If my electrical installation starts a fire, I pay or go to
| jail. If the norm I based it on was wrong and that started the
| fire, the norm will get changed and everybody from now on has
| to follow these updated rules. Existing buildings might need to
| be updated. There are laws specifically regulating how often
| such checks have to be done. Because this is what engineers do:
| they follow boring norms, try to apply them to the problem and
| if they fail they personally suffer for it. In fact all that
| stiffness, all that lack of fun, all these rules can be seen as
| the engineers way of surving their career without landing in
| jail.
|
| Meanwhile as a software engineer you can write code that
| processes the healthcare data for millions of people, leak all
| that data through a combination of bad decisions nobody should
| have made again since the early ninties and still stay a
| programmer, Buffer overflows, SQL injections, DIY crypto,
| unsalted MD5 hashing, you name it.
|
| Again: maybe individual people have higher standards (me for
| example), but the lived practice is so bad, calling it
| engineering would really border to an insult against those who
| really put their careers, families and wellbeing on the line in
| other engineering professions.
|
| If electrical engineering was like programming electrical fires
| and electrical shocks would be the leading cause of death.
| detaro wrote:
| Is the person doing the electrical wiring for a house an
| "engineer"? Here in the German-speaking countries a vocal
| subset of Electrical Engineers will be very insistent that
| you recognize the mere tradesperson wiring the house
| following the norms is _not_ an Engineer and fundamentally
| different, even if they are legally qualified to inspect and
| certify it. (unless they happen to also have an engineering
| degree, but that 's not the common path)
|
| Which I think translates to software: lots of development
| work is not engineering, but that doesn't mean engineering
| doesn't happen in software or that the field of Software
| Engineering is not a thing. And since we do not use the
| degree to distinguish, it gets tricky who gets that title and
| who doesn't, and what part of an individuals work is what.
|
| (And that's not just a software thing, e.g. aviation flight
| engineers don't really fit that scheme either. I guess their
| equivalents are SREs?)
| proc0 wrote:
| What if you work on game engines, rendering engines, or
| simulation engines? I think 'software engineer' is different than
| just 'engineer', but it's used for short. Software engines, for
| lack of a better term, are software applications that do most of
| the runtime heavy lifting, of some kind, whether it's simulating
| worlds or rendering web pages. I agree it's different than just
| development, or just programming.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| Wholeheartedly agreed! As a Canadian, I am upset that my current
| title is Software Engineer:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring
| mpalmer wrote:
| Interesting - the company I work for (based in US) was recently
| acquired by a Canadian business, and one of the immediate
| changes was the retitling of all "software engineers" to
| "software developers".
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Yeah, Engineer is a protected title in Canada.
| dublin wrote:
| It's also protected (though rarely enforced) in some
| states. Unless they've changed the law, it's illegal to
| call yourself and engineer in Texas unless you're a
| Professional Engineer licensed by the state (or another
| state - I think there's reciprocity there - if only we
| could get that for carrying firearms...) This change was
| made sometime in the late '90s, and I should have taken
| advantage of the grandfathering opportunity which would
| have made PE certification easier. That said, I've never
| _needed_ a P.E. stamp, since on any project big enough to
| require that level of formality, I had access to in-house
| or contract engineers that could sign off.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| By comparison, if you deal with unity customer support, a
| "customer service engineer" will reply and fail to help you
| caseyohara wrote:
| Sweetwater, the music equipment store, has "Sales
| Engineers" https://www.sweetwater.com/about/sales-
| engineers/
| detaro wrote:
| Sound Engineer, Studio Engineer, ... used a lot in music.
| caseyohara wrote:
| Exactly. That's why I think TFA is silly for singling out
| software engineers.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I've never seen a job in Canada advertised for Software
| Engineer, unless it actually required you to have an
| Engineering degree. In which case you could have an Iron Ring.
| benjaminjosephw wrote:
| I'm enjoying the _irony_ in the fact that the "Iron Ring" can
| be made of either iron or stainless steel. The symbolism and
| principles represented matter more than technically correct
| naming conventions.
|
| In the same way, the job title shouldn't matter as much as the
| principles of ethical professionals. Should we really be using
| job titles to indicate the expectations around ethical conduct?
| djoldman wrote:
| It's marketing.
|
| "Engineer" shouldn't be a protected designation. It depends on
| the state: see this vice article on a licensing board getting
| shot down[0].
|
| Professionals want to give themselves the most serious and
| qualified-sounding names they can.
|
| Unfortunately, this article appears to be another in a long line
| of longform trolling designed to stimulate emotional response and
| drive clicks without any real substance..
|
| [0]https://www.vice.com/en/article/yw798m/oregon-
| unconstitution...
| atoav wrote:
| I am currently learning 9046 norms each with 30 to 300 pages of
| densely packed text only about the LV electrical grid. I have
| to _know_ these norms to be allowed to do anything meaningful.
|
| If I don't know them I could still do stuff, but the likelyhood
| of landing in jail because what I planned started a fire or
| killed someone would be very real.
|
| Going to jail because you managed to replicate a SQL injection
| that everybody and their dog knows since the 90s is something I
| really would like to see in software engineering.
|
| Because you know: engineers are personally liable for the
| decisions they take and for the things they should have known
| but didn't.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Engineer is a protected title in many places because non
| engineers are not legally allowed to do certain safety critical
| work. If you got your way, some random who went to a bridge
| design boot camp would be designing the bridges in town
| yen223 wrote:
| There is a series of blog posts by Hillel Wayne, where he
| interviews former "real" engineers who became software
| developers, and asked them whether software development is
| engineering.
|
| 15 out of 17 subjects said yes, software development is
| engineering.
|
| One interesting takeaway for me from that article is that we
| over-romanticise what "real" engineers actually do in their day-
| to-day life. "Real" engineering practices is messy and sloppy in
| ways that would make software developers uncomfortable, according
| to the some people who worked on both sides.
|
| The articles are well worth a read:
|
| https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/crossover-project/are-we-re...
|
| https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/crossover-project/we-are-no...
|
| https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/crossover-project/what-we-c...
| abriosi wrote:
| Lol, what?
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Stopped taking this article seriously at "--oh, engineer, in
| tech-bro speak." This is an ignorant position. In the US at
| least, software engineering is a valid way to refer to some
| programmers. The idea is MEANT to conflate traditional
| engineering disciplines with software development. So much so the
| government itself uses this vernacular to describe programmers on
| its payrole.
|
| Ref: Not a software engineer, programmer, or "tech-bro" ::rolls
| eyes::
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| I have a BEng in Software Engineering. My degree curriculum was
| approved by the IET, and they and the BCS have frequently raised
| the subject of chartered status and requirements in the UK, and
| I'd consider it but fear they could not keep up.
|
| I build systems in the public interest to the same extent that
| all other engineers do. The idea that tech has had disasters and
| so is "below" engineers of other disciplines is dismissive of
| bridge collapses, plane crashes and nuclear reactor accidents
| that are nothing to do with the software branch of engineering.
|
| This article is gatekeeping snobbery and makes no serious
| contribution to the discussion of my profession, or its standing.
| tdeck wrote:
| This is a perennial argument that I personally find both
| pointless and stupid. I have no problem calling myself a
| programmer - I don't find the word demeaning or inaccurate. My
| dad was a "programmer" in the '90s, after all.
|
| That said, I call myself an engineer because that's what everyone
| I know doing the same job calls themselves. That's the point of
| language - to communicate. Even the author of this article hasn't
| provided any evidence that this causes confusion amidst a long
| ramble about how computer programs sometimes don't work (this
| happens in every profession), Uber doesn't consider itself a taxi
| company (completely irrelevant), and that other kinds of
| engineers design different types of things (obvious and self-
| explanatory). Even the author points out that you don't "always"
| need a PE license to practice these other disciplines in the U.S.
|
| What purpose would be served by making a point of using a
| different title, other than satisfying the people who write these
| kinds of condescending articles? It would be easier for such
| people to get over themselves and stop pretending they don't know
| what I mean when I say I am a software engineer.
| seumars wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment but disagree with the metaphor. The
| truth is that software development is still a young profession
| with new standards still being, well, developed. Also the quality
| of software is much more at risk of being deteriorated by
| business shenanigans than say a bridge, so putting the blame on
| programmers for data breaches and even comparing software to
| bridges is plain naive. A more apt metaphor for developing
| software would be: you're commissioned to build a car, but you're
| forced to put it on the road halfway through the building
| process, and now you have to build the rest of the car without
| slowing down and hoping it doesn't explode in the process.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| This article gets uppity about programmers using the term
| engineer, imagine their surprise when they find out US Navy
| mechanics call themselves engineers. The biggest lunkhead A-gang
| mechanics on my sub were all "engineers>" Even the nuclear
| engineers onboard were not called that.
| alboy wrote:
| >But by definition, "engineering" has traditionally entailed the
| completion of an Accreditation Board for Engineering and
| Technology (ABET)-approved 4-year degree. >Engineerwashing
| entails a shift from the noun to the verbal sense of "engineer."
|
| I urge the author who describes himself as "the Ivan Allen
| College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies" to stop engaging in
| blatant chairwashing until he has four legs and, ideally, a soft
| cushion.
| pojzon wrote:
| Ive finished studies of computer science combined with electric
| faculty.
|
| I bery well deserve to call myself an engineer after such
| studies.
|
| If someone is self taught programmer, thats a completely
| different story.
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