Programmers should not call themselves engineers (2015)

Also, the law in my state is less concerned with the specific title, than about what people actually do. In general, professions that could affect public safety are regulated. That includes haircutting, K-12 teaching, and engineering.

Still, similar to what people do in Germany, my friends who have their own businesses, but are unlicensed, choose vague business names that avoid the words "engineering" or "design." My LLC is "technology."

The difference is that engineers have both professional ethical obligations that they can fall back on and accountability. It is possible that the guy who stamped the sinking skyscraper will lose his license, for example.

In technology, the lack of a real engineering culture is a profoundly negative thing in many ways. When your boss demands that you do something clearly unethical, you have no backdrop as a professional to say "I cannot do this". Engineers, attorneys and CPAs have that.

Engineering is very predictable because of the enormous amount of procedure. It takes precisely X labor hours for an engineer to analyze a house roof blueprint and specify a scalable system of installing anything from 1 panel to covering the entire roof with solar panels that will survive local wind and snow loads with essentially 100% survivability yet also being minimal cost. Its just incredibly predictive.

On the other hand a lot of software development is throw something brand new at the wall see if it sticks, if it does, great, scale till it doesn't, if it does not then its not your fault because its new and nobody can predict nothing in software development. Will it take 3 months or 4 months to write that app, who knows, unpredictable.

No large body of "human life trustworthy" predictable process has developed... yet... for software except in the simplest cases.

It doesn't help that due to moore's transistor law times were changing fast such that what would have required a miracle and some scientific breakthrus in the 70s is now the structural engineering equivalent of some carpenter building a doghouse, its so small that overbuilding doesn't matter and theres no human lives at stake so hiring a structural engineer for hours to calculate the rafter geometry and size for a doghouse is a waste of time and money, leading ignorant people to think solid engineering principles are in opposition to profit for ALL software development, which is a bit of a mistake.

And leading to a desire for software engineering to exist, although there is no academic teachable scalable hyper-predictable mathematically provable process for software development like there is for circuit analysis or structural beam design or chemical process kinetics for scaling so desiring "truely engineering like software dev" is like wishing for magic to be true, sure would be convenient if it existed, but since it doesn't, the people who claim to be engineers are kinda like people who claim to be alchemists, best hold on to your hat.

With a side dish of "engineer" being a modern term of nobility only granted by certain authorities and extremely jealously legally guarded.

And a side dish of hiring people who know nothing about computers or engineering think engineer sounds impressive, so its required on resumes, just like "rock star" or "guru" or "ninja".