How I left a 4 year career in finance and became a software engineer in 5 months

The hard part is I think he might have a point, there is a lot more to been a professional software engineer than I think can reasonably be taught in 5 months (even if you spend that 5 months learning 20 hours a day 7 days a week).

Of course this is all entirely my own opinion, I've seen evidence neither one way or the other to back it up but if I where hiring a software engineer (lets say a web developer because that's mostly what I do these days so the most likely hire I'd make in the near time).

This is at least what I'd expect of someone calling themselves a software engineer :-

At least two programming languages (I don't really care what they are a good programmer can be competent in any of the major web languages fairly quickly).

A solid grasp of HTML, CSS and Javascript (I don't care if you have to google some of this stuff but you should understand the DOM, the CSS selector model and enough Javascript to write a jQuery plugin)

A solid of grasp of relational databases including the following (primary keys, normalization, key constraints, indexes - I'd also expect but not require they'd understand some of the internals and how a query planner works) and a solid grasp of SQL.

A solid understanding of DBAL's, ORM's.

Solid grasp of common design patters (active record, repositories/entity, unit of work)

Solid grasp of MVC and the pro's and cons

Good understanding of either Windows or Linux.

Good understanding of source control.

Good understanding of why comments are important.

Good understanding of unit testing/integration testing.

To use an analogy (I deal with lots of business people, analogies help) You could teach someone to lay bricks to a good standard in 5 months, You could not teach them to be a safe civil engineer.

Your four years of schooling to get an engineering degree had plenty of exams, spread over the four years. At most you only had to study for one or two of them at a time. The Professional Engineering exam covers everything you were supposed to learn during those four years, all at once. You can't cram for a test like that; you have to actually know things. That's the whole point: did you absorb the knowledge completely, or did you just get by from test to test?

It's done this way because, for most Professional Engineers, decisions have to be made which can cost people their lives if mistakes are made. You gotta know what you're doing before you're allowed to make those decisions.

For most software engineering mistakes aren't nearly that critical, plus for most organizations doing software development preventing bugs to the same degree that a Civil Engineer prevents bridges from failing is too expensive and not worth it.