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Comment by rcbdev | Hacker News Reader

Maybe not in the U.S. but in Europe, Software Engineering is often a field of engineering where one can get licensed.

i.e. in Austria many IT techs and devs are called (at the doctor's office or in formal settings) "Mr. Engineer" ("Herr Ingenieur") if they fulfill some formal criteria and get licensed. A further qualification is becoming a federally certified civil technician for IT (Ziviltechniker or Ingenieurskonsulent) - also something that public sector contracts sometimes mandate.

Software around the world is engineered - it just often isn't in California.

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Here's a story for you: I was born and raised in Switzerland, but I live in Germany now. When I first moved here, I was working as a freelancer and needed to register as a sole entrepreneur (Einzelunternehmen, one of the legal entity forms here).

Now, there are several types of taxes you pay in Germany based on your income. One of them is the income tax, the other is called Gewerbesteuer (maybe best translated as "commmercial tax) - and the Gewerbesteuer can be significant (something like 12% of your income). Many freelancers are exempt from the Gewerbesteuer, and so are software engineers. However, I learned that you only qualify as a software engineer if you have actually studied software engineering or a closely related field. I had studied business administration. I tried to explain to them that I have been working as a software developer for over 10 years, literally doing the same job as somebody who had studied software engineering - to no avail. They woulnd't exempt me from the Gewerbesteuer.

I'm not claiming that I'm an "engineer" or that my computer science fundamentals are as good as somebody who studied computer science, but the tax exemption shouldn't be on some bureaucratic difference like what you studied a decade ago, rather on what kind of job you're doing.

Welcome to Germany!

Yeah, Germany is kind of a bureaucratic hellhole. And from what I know France is even worse.

As for formal education - I've seen dozens of people with an engineering diploma who barely can write a FizzBuzz, so it is not the best indicator and mostly people don't look at it when it comes to recruitment aside from big corps. Although that kinda changed lately as junior positions started evaporating and without experience the diploma is the main thing they check.

Yeah. I also never had problems getting a job or similar because of my non-CS degree.

Bizarrely enough, I always had "Software Engineer" written on all my documents here in Germany: my old Residence Permit, tax documents, contracts, the speedy authorisation from Agentur für Arbeit when I moved here, etc. As far as BRD is concerned, I am a software engineer.

But I never really studied software engineering or anything related, only Electric Engineering.

But nobody in the government knows that. I don't have my diploma papers with me and have no time or interest in going to my country of origin and ask my university for it.

It doesn't matter so much because with a degree in electric engineering you are allowed to call yourself an Engineer/Ingenieur, and that is the only thing that matters. It is a Ordnungswidrigkeit (administrative offence) if you call yourself an engineer if you don't have a at least 3 year degree from a university or university of applied sciences.

With a degree in computer science you are also allowed to call yourself an engineer in Germany, for anyone reading this and wondering.

I live in a country where software engineers often have engineering degrees.

What that means in practice is that they study math and physics for the first 2-3 years of their degree, instead of computer science or software engineering.

Does that make them build better systems than Californian devs? Based on company revenues and salaries, I’d say no.

> Does that make them build better systems than Californian devs? Based on company revenues and salaries, I’d say no.

Majority of silicon valley devs are immigrants though, they are good because they are sourced and filtered from all over the world not thanks to American education.

Many of the immigrant devs attended American Education like Stanford, Georgia tech, MIT, CMU, one of the UC’s, etc.

Yet almost every major piece of software or idea started in California and almost nothing noteworthy in the space started in Austria. I think that tells us something about the real value of a piece of paper granting you the right to call yourself an "engineer".

I'm sure there are many things which make this such an unfair comparison that it's not worth making. If there was a firehose of money spraying all over Austria as a result of being the worlds reserve currency I'm sure the shoe would be on the other foot.

Plus primary spoken language (Austrian-style German) and size of domestic market explains a lot.

What is the mechanism by which being the reserve currency sprays a firehose of money into the US?

Keep in mind that being the major economy also carries costs - the US spends many times as much as other countries on its military and has no realistic path towards spending less.

And either way, their economy has been wildly succesful since the 1800’s.

IrfanView?

> Software around the world is engineered - it just often isn't in California.

A gatekeeping organisation you have to pay to enter the workforce isn't the same as something actually being "engineered".

This "gatekeeping organization" is the federal government. They have you pass an exam to prove that you know about public procurement law and how to plan and oversee a software engineering project before they let you work on public sector contracts, where you have to responsibly handle tax payer funds.

For something like this to work there needs to be a strong and technically competent government that the tax payers trust. This is presumably why it works in Austria and not the USA.

You can enter the workforce as a developer here without being licensed or credentialed at all, it's absolutely no problem (legally speaking) - it's just an obvious sign of a commitment to engineering responsibility and quality.

    > they fulfill some formal criteria and get licensed

Can you tell us about the process to get licensed? Do you think it adds value for software developers?

And just to troll a little bit: Do they make you do any hard problems from HackerRank or LeetCode?

"Software around the world is engineered - it just often isn't in California."

Can you explain the difference between 'engineered' software, and the rest? I mean other than being created by someone with an engineering certificate or whatever.

I'm no defender of Degrees as a mark of quality

But, for me it implies that it gets Planned and Worked on formally like other engineering projects, Lists of Requierements, Detailed Propossals, Design documents, BOM's ,Gantt Charts, the whole shebang

The alternative being the ultra lean SV style, where a project is lucky if even the public facing documentation is not at least N-months out of date

Having any documentation it's pretty much a miracle.

Normally in startups it is very common to have the only available documentation be the code itself.

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