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Comment by HidyBush | Hacker News Reader

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HidyBush

"How I successfully became a civil engineer in 3 months"

Brrrrr.

Why the hell this is allowed when talking about software is beyond me.

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Because the term [junior/senior] software engineer doesn't mean anything.

If you have a laptop, congrats you're now a software engineer.

They should call themselves "programmers" - if they can actually do the job of programming what they have been taught in that bootcamp (and it looks they can, being employed now). But engineering is a well defined term and sometimes even protected in many other places. I work with people of all kind of backgrounds, but you can definitely notice the difference in feedback you receive from somebody with a university background (which I would call engineer).

If you have a laptop you have the tool you need to write software. But that does not mean that you have the skills and expertise to practise engineering applied to building software products within strict constraints.

Similarly, woodworking tools do not make one a carpenter.

Because people expect bridges to work and software to fail.

Because you can't really teach yourself civil engineering. A degree is more or less mandatory so all civil engineers have at least 3 years of learning behind them.

There's no qualification required to become a "software engineer", so you can absolutely become one (maybe not a very good one) in 3 months.

I disagree. There are things that should be required for a software engineer to know. Queueing theory comes to mind

I'd wager any problem involving queuing theory could be googled/researched in under a day. Hard to call it a requirement when you can just.. look it up when you need it.

Is there any topic which cannot be googled in one day, civil engineering included? I certainly hope nobody employs "googling engineers" in anything requiring, ahem, "engineering".

Queueing theory is a weirdly niche thing to require. I guess almost nobody is a software engineer according to you!

Queueing is niche?

If you have to program ANYTHING that serves requests and has a limited buffer you enter the domain of queueing theory.

Processing internet packets? Queueing theory.

Developing a distributed system? Queueing theory.

Designing software to manage a call center? Queueing theory.

Shipments? Ticketing? Payments? A myriad of other things? Queueing theory.

Fun fact, while posting this reply HN redirected my to a page "Sorry we're not able to serve your request this quickly". Guess what would have helped?

Queueing theory.

Sure you could analyse all of those things using queuing theory but with the exception of distributed systems, TCP etc. and maybe super large scale distribution (e.g. Amazon warehouses), you 100% do not need to.

What exactly is queuing theory going to tell you about managing a call centre? Why would I need to know some deep theory to be able to stick calls in a FIFO and deal them out to agents?

Are you just proud of having studied queueing theory?

My thoughts exactly.

language evolves, but professional societies are important for workers, I think it will take a bigger revolution for workers to re-frame the term again given the now-standard title inflation to software engineer across industry, even here in canada

What percentage of seasoned software engineers do any kind of formal model checking?

Edit: lol, love the downvotes. The fact is, 10 years of Agile TDD OOP cargo cult only makes you a marginally better Engineer than a bootcamper.

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