281–290 of 393 posts
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https://ncees.org/engineering/pe/software/ You can become a licensed software engineer
"NCEES discontinued the PE Software exam after April 2019."
In any case, software engineering seems to be considered a legitimate engineering discipline.
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I was told (if I remember correctly) that discriminated castes get an advantage (or even a certain percentage of seats) at universities in India. I am surprised this could be considered mind blowing, isnt there also affirmative action for college admission in America?
Universities aren't allowed to have racial quotas in the US. They are allowed have affirmative action that is implemented in a fuzzy non-numerical way, but they can't just say "we will admit X students of Y race".
> 3,500 engineering schools across the country, and about 90% of graduates do not have the programming skills to work in software engineering, according to one study. The "study" is by 'Aspiring Minds' - an Indian company that sells buggy web-based pre-interview filtering tests as a service. It is in Aspiring Minds interest to portray Indian graduates as incompetent to make Indian employers buy their pre-interview fi…
> But today I'm a full-stack developer in Denmark. Would you mind sharing more details about this? Were your recruited or did you seek out overseas employment? I'm Indian but in the US since a young age; I'll be finishing my CS education next year and would like to leave this country.
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> He said it was a hold over from the cast system I was with you until the "cast (sic) system". > you are held in more esteem in India when you manage more people. You can replace "India" with literally any country in the world. Managers and bosses always are and always have been held in more esteem than leaf node workers, in every society past and present. It's got nothing to do with the caste system. Personal anecd…
> I was with you until the "cast (sic) system" You will have to take this as second hand information as I am not familiar with the relics of the cast system. But as he relayed it to me. When you go on a date with a girl that would be considered to be in a higher social status than yourself, the first thing the father will ask is how many people do you manage. Being a manager seems to provide some mobility in the reli…
(Am Indian, have gone on plenty of dates without ever meeting anyone's father.)
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Wait... so in your mind there is a distinct difference between a developer, programmer, and engineer? Because in my mind, they are all the same. How are they different, in your mind?
IMO, developer and programmer are the same. Engineer implies a higher level of skill WRT establishing and following processes designed to minimize risk. A software engineer, like their mechanical or civil equivalents, has a strong sense of duty WRT building things that are useful, safe, reproducible, etc. No doubt the line is gray. But, your stereotypical web app developer (failing fast while chasing a unicorn) is no…
A person with degree or a person with a specific set of skills? If skills, then can you enumerate few of them?
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"Staff" and "Senior staff" and such are only recognized by ingroups. And often you need to be a staff level engineer to even begin managing people in tech. In most industries that aren't tech, compensation and prestige are directly proportional to how many people you manage. Only in tech can individual senior engineers have impact that justifies the high pay without managing people.
Consultants, lawyers, physicians, engineers, architects, designers, board members... lots of occupations with high status and/or pay without managing people. The 'how many people' you manage metric is just a heuristic, and maybe believed by people stuck in the middle of business hierarchies. Agree on 'Staff' and 'Senior staff'... military terms that never caught on generally. Not sure why they have started being adop…
> Consultants
A term so generic as to be almost meaningless. It can apply to an Agile coach, an Ivy League fresh grad billed at $1200/hr by McKinsey et al, or a programmer with an LLC and some marketing skills. These all vary widely in prestige.
> lawyers
Ditto. No one is impressed by a poor ambulance chaser or public defender. Judges, senior partners at big law firms, senior corporate counsel, DAs and attorneys general - those are lawyers people generally respect. And they all have authority over people and laws.
> engineers
Depends on where they work and what they do. Engineer at FAANG or a hotshot startup - that's been glamorized by media and entertainment but that's a relatively recent phenomenon. Engineer at a mid-sized auto parts or chemical company - usually associated with pocket protectors and slide rules, but basically just solid pros that take home a solid paycheck.
> physicians
They don't always hire or fire people but they certainly give orders. To patients, nurses, technicians. Physicians have always been respected, in every society across time.
> architects
Same deal as engineers. Plus on significant projects (like a skyscraper, apartment complex, government building etc) there's probably a team of architects that have one or more managers. Someone with an architect's license working for the city planning office in a non-leadership role? Not especially prestigious.
> designers
Are we talking about fashion designers? They don't manage people? Like literally zero people? That's news to me.[1][2][3]
> board members
They can literally vote to fire the boss of bosses - the CEO. And usually they're appointed on the basis of their achievements in business, law, or the industry.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_Klein
I am an Indian and I have seen so many worthless engineering colleges. The main issues, at least in my opinion, are "very very" bad teaching and very low incentives for someone to study well. I can't fathom how easy it is to pass a class in these engineering colleges and how widespread plagiarism is. When >50% points of the class is determined by a single exam that repeats same questions every year, it isn't hard to…
> The main issues, at least in my opinion, are "very very" bad teaching and very low incentives for someone to study well. Another significant element I'd point to is outdated curricula. By way of example, many Indian CS course materials still require students to use Turbo C++ -- an IDE from the mid-1990s which runs under DOS. Needless to say, what ends up being taught is hardly representative of modern practices.
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Because humans are pattern matchers. We have to strive to eliminate or reduce conscience and subconscious biases to ensure fairness. I know intelligent and successful people who would never take financial advice from someone with a beard for example. Edit: maybe an interesting example. I grew up around smart woman and girls. From observation, I “knew” women were smarter than men. I was in college before I heard that…
> Because humans are pattern matchers Agree, but then you would think that engineers (when it comes to working with other engineers) are a little more rational than the average folks and can go beyond superficial observations.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Churning out engineers as fast as possible and pressuring everyone to become one despite lack of interest just guarantees you will churn out astronomical numbers of crappy engineers. And I hate to say it... but it possibly creates unintentional racial bias in interviewers because the sheer volume of crappy engineers being churned out from [Indian/Chin…
I also have a problem with calling developers engineers . Heck, I would be offended if someone called me a developer rather than a programmer. But unfortunately even the degrees themselves become less significant. A PhD in mathematics used to mean more than it does now. But another point is that with global literacy going up, scarse skills are now not based on the amount of people with certain degrees, but rather wit…
Well, I for one am both a developer and an engineer. I have a B. Eng (equivalent) degree in ICT and I work as a full-stack dev. I don't really have a problem with using either "developer" or "software engineer" to describe myself.
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Is it getting easier though? Did you try "modern" web development lately? Good luck piecing together a working website...
It is easier. If you wanted to create a web application from the dotcom era, you could probably knock it out faster by one or two orders of magnitude. It will probably look neater too, and you won't spend days or months tuning it so it will look decent in IE. We even have amazing CSS capabilities now. If you wanted to create something that's better than the pages we had in the Geocities era, you can do that in 5 minu…