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rdiddly

Look, do you use

specialized knowledge or techniques

to design things,

to achieve or cause a specific outcome

within certain limits or constraints?

Then you're doing engineering. Whether to call yourself an engineer, well in the absence of a formal certification program, that's gonna be up to you and/or your employer. Former civil/structural here (that's the bridge-building one, and as far as I know, the most stringently credentialed/licensed).

It's helpful to remember that "engineer" comes from the French ingénieur which is also the source of the word "ingenuity." So an engineer is basically just an ingenuity-izer if you will. If you trace it back further, you get to the Latin ingenium (engine), of which the "genium" part comes from gignere (basically to cause something) which gives us "engender" and "generate" and "progeny" so you see there's a creative aspect too.

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My take is that engineering is essentially the use of predictive models to solve design problems. I think the general trend is that the more accurate and universally accepted the models are, the more ‘engineery’ a particular discipline is. EEs use models of circuits and devices. ChemEs use models of chemical reactions. MechEs use models based on physics. Financial engineers use models of options pricing, etc. Optical engineers use optics.

So, similarly, SWEs are engineers to the extent that they use widely accepted models to solve design problems. People building compilers, databases, or OS schedulers might be called engineers, because there are relatively well accepted (but evolving) models of the performance and capabilities of those things—-although those models are perhaps less universally accepted than say, Newton’s laws. Hacking, on the other hand, is not engineering, because it is not backed by something like a well-understood model. It therefore tends to command less respect, as the output of such activity is less certain—since there is no good predictive model to judge whether that activity will achieve the goal.

The model aspect is a good addition, because that's one of the things that differentiates engineers from pure scientists, or mathematicians. Engineers design to the model, which in some cases may not represent reality with complete accuracy, but will in those cases be much easier to work with. So long as that model has a demonstrated track-record of producing good results, and the same assumptions it makes have been proven valid for the current design, then it's usually good enough for design purposes.

EDIT: I should have just read GIFtheory's post below! That's pretty much what I meant.

The devil is in the details though. How specific does the outcome need to be? And do you actually have to achieve the intended outcome in order for it to be engineering? Or just use the techniques with the hope of achieving the outcome?

Personally I think engineering is characterized primarily by predictability, usually through mathematical modelling. There's no absolute guarantee of success, but a Hail Mary isn't good enough either. Engineering is somewhere in between.

For example, the Mars Climate Orbiter didn't work, but no one would say that the people who built it weren't doing engineering. A simple but critical mistake was made in it's implementation. If it had been build according to the model, it would have worked.

On the other hand, was the Obamacare website engineered? I would say no. A few napkin calculations would have shown that it would not handle the load. No one had any business expecting it to work as deployed. And that is how a lot of software is written. No serious attempt is made to model the problem and prove that the solution will work.

Now that I think of it, so-called software engineering is the only engineering discipline I can think of where it's widely believed that mathematics is not required. The blogosphere seems to be riddled with posts that might as well be called "No good at maths? No problem - just become a programmer!"

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