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Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

What of those who graduated from engineering programs taught at engineer colleges?

Lots of people in other engineering disciplines build stuff with less rigor than is used to build software. Maybe load test it in Fusion 360 before sending the file to be milled. And lots of software companies test their stuff quite rigorously.

People who write software have imposter syndrome. Other disciplines are not building things better than we do. For every Google there's a Ford, and for every scrappy startup there's a scrappy machine shop.

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> What of those who graduated from engineering programs taught at engineer colleges?

For new grads? In my experience, they're usually miles behind an 18 year old who has been messing around in their spare time for a few years. There are, of course, exceptions, but at this point seeing something they don't teach at the local universities is more eye-catching on a resume than most degrees.

It usually means they bothered to learn something on their own.

> What of those who graduated from engineering programs taught at engineer colleges?

We are the actual Engineers. For US-Based IT workers, that means a degree from an ABET [1] backed institution with a traditional undergrad and graduate programs.

Anyone else calling themselves an "engineer" while doing IT work are not.

In addition: Readers need to remember this isn't reddit and downvoting comments with facts you do not like is not appropriate for Hacker News. It's is depressing this reminder needs to be added here for facts as it appears a few readers here have forgotten already.

[1] https://www.abet.org/

I would trust someone graduating with CS degree from non-ABET accredited Stanford rather than someone from ABET-accredited CS program of Athens State University.

... Except Stanford is ABET accredited, and as are all the major Engineering institutions and leaders.

The fact that most users here are reaching to downvote literally the fact that leading Engineering institutions all fall in this bucket is absolutely depressing from this community. It's clear some feelings have been "hurt" here by other users having higher educations.

It's not all-or-nothing for the university -- some programs are not.

"Like the CS department, the EE department is no longer ABET accredited. While such accreditation is useful in certain disciplines such as civil engineering, it has no practical significance whatsoever in computer science."

https://cs.stanford.edu/degrees/undergrad/Considering.shtml

Similarly, UC Berkeley also declined to renew their ABET acreditation for their EECS department, and so they haven't been ABET-accredited for the past few years.

"Both of these programs are accredited by ABET through September 30, 2019, but because we have decided not to continue applying for ABET accreditation, we will be developing a single set of student learning outcomes for our department, rather than using the two sets of outcomes mandated by ABET for EECS departments. "

https://eecs.berkeley.edu/academics/undergraduate/eecs-bs/ob...

That's all just protectionism. Or an attempt at it, because it's clearly not working in the software industry.

I am a graduate of such a school and it is a pain to even use that (earned and legally awarded) title in an international context because countries only recognise their own schools. Even in the EU, with its standardized EU-wide titles, you still can't use the "local" title of another country. Even if both titles are accredited to the same EU-title.

It's all status games and protectionism. And it's a silly war to fight, because no one thinks a "software engineer" is an accredited engineer anymore anyway.

Just because a private organization says they have monopoly on the word “engineer” doesn’t mean they actually do.

Exactly this. Being told who the "real" engineers are is simply a good way of parting suckers with their money for "accreditation" or whatever such nonsense.

Completely depressing looking back at this thread and realizing that Hacker News has an issue with users holding advance degrees. I expect this jealousy and hatred from sites like reddit and Facebook, it should not be tolerated here on HN. This is NOT ok behavior especially from the amount of work these graduates and institutions have pushed into our fields. There is a complete lack of respect here and it shows.

You are not an engineer if you did not flow through an ABET institution. You're a developer, nothing wrong with that but you're not an Engineer. No, I do not care if your company has other certain titles, those are easily made up and have no academic backing.

This behavior we're seeing here is the same as if I pretended I was an MD after taking a first-aid-class. It's disrespectful to those that put in the effort to expand our academic understandings and our capabilities for others to turn around and then pretend that title is their own.

It is not.

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