Comment by barik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barik | Hacker News Reader

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"As someone with an engineering degree, it does irk me to constantly hear programmers referred to around these quarters as 'engineers', it's extremely introspective, and IMO a little disrespectful."

I'm not certain it has anything to do with the physical world; after all Industrial Engineering is considered a valid disciplined that is entitled to an Engineering license, and many of the IE's I know might be better characterized as mathematicians.

Still, I tend to agree with your assessment of the term Engineer, although it's largely because unlike other Engineering fields, Software Engineers in the US seem to be happy to hold the title without having to meet any of the legal requirements [1]. A PE license, while not insurmountable, is not exactly the easiest title to acquire. Efforts have been proposed to make Software Engineering part of this licensing process, but it seems to have a lot of push back. Perhaps the solution is to have legal weight (perhaps like 'Lawyer' or 'MD') behind the title, as countries like Canada have (the US has this to some extent, but it's not nearly as strong).

[1] http://www.ncees.org/Exams/PE_exam.php

> Perhaps the solution is to have legal weight (perhaps like 'Lawyer' or 'MD') behind the title, as countries like Canada have (the US has this to some extent, but it's not nearly as strong).

But here you're taking it for granted that professional licensure of software engineering is actually desirable, which is not at all agreed upon. Among the organizations against the notion are the ACM.

No, I don't think I am. I believe I addressed this when I said: "Efforts have been proposed to make Software Engineering part of this licensing process, but it seems to have a lot of push back."

As you indicated, ACM would constitute as (a major) part of that push back, so I don't see the contradiction.

I think one of the problems is that professional licensure of software engineering would require the codification and legalization of a set of knowledge and standard agreed upon. This set of knowledge would be used as a metric of what is expected from an 'reasonable' engineer, thus making any professional engineer liable toward society (and more specifically toward courts) to meet those standards.

The problem in this is that nobody agrees on this set of standard/knowledge (a Body Of Knowledge). For instance, if the document and the experts required to testify in court define that "a reasonable engineer has to use a waterfall methodology", then you could be liable for using an agile methodology (that's just an example). The domain being so young, there is not yet an agreed upon profile of what a 'reasonable software engineer' might be. The SWEBOK[1] attempt to define such a profile was initially supported by both IEEE and ACM, but - if I remember well - the ACM dropped their support in face of these concerns.

I think both organizations support the legalization of the "Software Engineering" field (and perhaps title), but also recognize that the field is not yet mature enough to be properly defined and regulated.

Disclaimer: I do not have sources for my claims on IEEE and ACM's positions on the matter; I merely read about it a few months ago. However, you can find interesting conversations on the subject by googling 'SWEBOK'.

[1]http://www.computer.org/portal/web/swebok

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