Programmers should not call themselves engineers (2015)

Perhaps we're just looking at a category of engineering that is not yet at that level of maturity.

If doctors weren't a licensed profession, they would still be doctors.

If barbers didn't need a certification, they would still be barbers.

Defining an "engineer" based on how much regulation they must follow is kind of ridiculous. It's putting the cart before the horse.

Which is not to say that the software field doesn't need regulation to improve the protection of customer data and the reliability of increasingly critical services.

If a developer says "I am an engineer" it is only ever in the context of a tech company, where everybody knows what they mean. No programmer would say to their friends & family "I am an engineer" without any further context.

"Software Engineer" does not denote any additional rigor, no matter how much you want it to. It may or may not connote rigor, depending on a dozen contextual factors that will tell you much more about the presence of rigor than the title will. It's a title. It means computer programmer.

I strongly disagree with this assertion that failures in tech make us undeserving of the moniker 'engineer'. Software systems are inherently complex, and we have built incredible testing tools, processes, continuous integration, monitoring systems, and infrastructure to add strong rigor to our discipline.

As part of most engineering degrees, students explore case studies of where engineering went wrong and failed. I can assure you that there are many failures in civil engineering (see ASCE's report card), mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and other engineering disciplines just as there have been failures in the tech industry.

Licensure is not as applicable to the tech industry, and certifications have been cheapened by low-quality applicants. They've become a negative signal. Additionally, the tech industry, in my opinion, innovates at a significantly faster pace than the licensed engineering disciplines. Perhaps these are correlated in some way.

Companies like Google are right not to overvalue degrees. If someone has the requisite knowledge and ability, it should not matter whether they learned from a book or on their own. Software interviews are significantly more rigorous that interviews in other engineering fields. Civil Engineers are not expected to be able to whiteboard open channel flow problems during an interview, but software engineers are expected to answer multiple interviews of algorithms and system design questions.

This article is just long-winded, useless rambling. Rage against Silicon Valley all you want, but we call ourselves engineers because we _are_ engineers. Software runs critical infrastructure in medicine, finance, aeronautics, traffic control systems, the electrical grid, and even the internet infrastructure used to deliver this nonsensical article. I suggest the author read about incidents such as the Therac-25.