Comment by kohanz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kohanz | Hacker News Reader

In many jurisdictions, the term "engineer" refers to a licensed professional. So a software engineer would be someone with the requisite education and professional experience to obtain that license and be endorsed by their local regulatory body. It would also mean additional professional and ethical obligations. In Canada, for example, you can't have the term "Engineer" in your job title without being a licensed professional engineer. However, this rule is poorly enforced and mostly ignored.

Now mind you, most software engineers are NOT engineers in that sense, but I still think of it that way. Most software engineers are really software developers, but the engineer title is more appealing for whatever reasons (status?). Programmer/Coder is just slang for Developer, IMHO.

> However, this rule is poorly enforced and mostly ignored.

Thank god.

IMHO, the current state is detrimental and devalues the profession. We put our trust in doctors, for example, because we know that someone who has self-taught themselves medicine and has no formal ethics training or obligations can't just obtain a title of doctor.

Who is "we"? I don't put my "trust" in doctors because some government bureaucracy decides they are allowed to call themselves that.

I ask around, then I do research myself on the internet (both about the potential doctor and what I'm going in for), and only then do I have a semblance of "trust".

(most of my friends are doctors)

Are you telling me that when you do your research, you include people who are not legal MD's in your search? If not, then you've proven the point of regulating the profession.

That is a very loose comparison, as even "trained" doctors have huge differences in skill levels. I personally ignore all formal programming education below a PhD in programming as IMHO programming is a discipline which needs self motivation and individual thought for anyone to excel at it. Teaching it to someone only goes so far.

For "programming", I would agree with you and that why anyone is free to call themselves a developer or programmer. We're specifically talking about the term "engineer" here, so it goes beyond "programming".

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