"Computer Science" is Not Science and "Software Engineering" is Not Engineering

You betcha, PEs are justifiably proud of the title.

We have sysadmins around here who call themselves "Microsoft system engineers". It bugs me, but title inflation is a Dilbertesque fact of life.

Not to be too hard on you though; yes, the biggest aesthetic difference between hardware and software engineering is that with the latter, the cost of fabrication is essentially zero. But as described here: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jajones/papers/p439.pdf

> The essential distinction between software and other engineered artifacts has always been the absence of fabrication cost. In conventional engineering of physical artifacts, the cost of materials and fabrication has dominated the cost of design and placed a check on the complexity of artifacts that can be designed. When one bottleneck is removed, others appear, and software engineering has therefore faced the essential challenges of complexity and the cost of design to an extent that conventional engineering has not.

So naturally the set of constraints is different than the ones with which hardware engineers contend, yet software engineers do fundamentally apply math and science to design products to meet hard, real-world constraints: Development time and cost, program correctness, time and space performance under expected load, reusability, and maintainability to name a few.

If there is a valid objection to the notion of software engineering as a "real" engineering discipline, it should be that a subset of the science upon which the discipline is based – that of software architecture – is at this point still underdeveloped and poorly understood, and as a result software engineers generally rely on their own intuition when it comes to architecture. (This in contrast to fundamental computer science, which is well developed enough that we can typically determine from mathematics or empirical evidence what kind of algorithm or data structure to use under given circumstances.)

But an arbitrary bias that engineers produce only physical artifacts does not constitute a valid objection.

Engineering is defined by the various international agencies and schools that accredit engineers, not Wikipedia. "Software Engineering" is a real engineering discipline in Canada and other places. The premise "An engineer's model must be tightly bound to the laws of physics and chemistry" just seems to be a construct of the author.

Engineering is about the practical application of rules, balancing factors like cost, maintainability and scope. Chemical, mechanical and software engineers do similar jobs, working with different sets of rules.

The problem is that there's a conflation in most people's minds of the terms 'computer science' and 'programming'. Computer Science courses teach you how to program, so this is understandable. But the research that goes on in Computer Science departments is not all about 'how to program'. Hypotheses are generated and tested for specific end-goals.

Sure, CS is highly mathematical in its execution, and the introspective areas of research are thus mathematical. Some of the research in the Algorithms areas is probably best published in mathematical journals. But that's not the whole science. What about measurements of routing efficiency in Networking? What about HCI? What about Ubicomp? What about NLP, or even AI in general? Even if they are using mathematical principles in forming their systems for experimentation, they're still doing science. Hell, all sciences rely on maths somewhere.