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Comment by Denzel | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by software engineering is a trade skill?

90% of modern software is plumbing with computers. Skilled work, but doesn't require degrees because we're not really doing anything all that interesting.

You don't need a degree for plumbing. It comes in damn handy when you're doing things like flow dynamics or combustion simulations

The other 90% is plumbing with people, users, managers and testers.

99% of software engineering is just data plumbing and processing. It does not require big picture thinking skills beyond the immediate problem or creative problem solving ability. Sure those skills help sometimes but the return diminishes rapidly and you could get by without them pretty much all the time. It's really not any harder than normal plumbing. The medium we work in and the tools and methods we use are different but that's mostly it.

I think this is less true than most people believe.

A well-intentioned intern can make a programming decision in an afternoon that might take a team of senior SWEs months or more to clean up later once the code or data is being used for something important.

We brush the bad engineering decisions under the rug by calling them "tech debt", but the truth is that if we invested more up front in hiring people with big picture skills and experience we'd probably save significantly more money in the long run, despite their higher salaries.

>A well-intentioned intern can make a programming decision in an afternoon that might take a team of senior SWEs months or more to clean up later once the code or data is being used for something important.

And a new maintenance tech with the wrong grease gun can cause millions of dollars of downtime. This kind of risk exists in all industries.

It's not something with a formal professional exam board that you have to pass, like law, medicine, chartered accountancy, or regular engineering. Nor is it a pure academic discipline. It's a commercial skill: a trade.

...and I really wish we had a strict professional exam to use the term "engineer".

To use the term, or to make software? The latter would basically be the end of startups and agility.

To sign mission-critical and potentially life-critical software and provide better safety guarantees. And have a professional body to protect employees from pressure to lower quality.

Just like aeronautical and construction engineering, surgery, dentistry...

My degree is a BsCpE. Should I be allowed to call myself an engineer?

Results are what matters. Titles are meaningless.

I don't disagree with that. I was trying to make a point.

I usually tell people "I program computers" when they ask what I do. I used to say "I do computers" but people are more used to computers and software now so fewer people ask, "so, you do computers?" so I had to change it up a bit.

The downvotes are telling.

Maybe I misused the term. I meant it more as a way to describe how learning software engineering is just as much about modeling sound principles and learning by example as it is learning theory and terminology. You don’t need a 4 year degree in order to do that, not because it isn’t a highly skilled occupation but because, on the contrary, it is highly specialized.

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