This is a new satire site, right? These days it's getting harder and harder to differentiate between reality and fiction in tech. The rest of their posts are pretty much spot on.
Reality in Canada.
It’s a good thing that Engineer is a protected profession and not everyone can claim it, like Lawyer or Doctor.
In the US now it’s “oh you’re an engineer? Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?”
I disagree, I believe the regulatory agencies do nothing in Canada to legitimize their claim to regulating software development. Heck, they do nothing for electronics or semiconductors or anything smaller than the power grid.
Software development is done by developers. If you are a software engineer chances are you’re working on software infrastructure that actually apply at scales that are not “add a shopping cart to this blog”.
There are reasons you ask a civil engineer for work.
You missed my point that if professional engineering societies in Canada want to take ownership of software and electronics, they better do something and not just say they're regulating it and sit on it with no clear definition for what it even is.
If they were doing their job, we wouldn't need to debate what a software engineer is. They've let us down and they're getting away with it.
The name of the website is a play on the satire website the onion, it's satire.
Funny enough, I probably did more software engineering as a web dev than I did as a software engineer at some companies.
In the UK, at least, the only difference typically between a web developer and a software engineer is £15-20k in salary. Frankly, we're all software engineers...
What are dev/engineer salaries like in the UK? Been considering places to move to...
About half of the equivalent in the US, often less. It's exceedingly rare to make 100k here even in a senior position, although it does exist. Median is 40-50k (pounds, so times that by 1.2 for USD).
I still wouldn't say software engineering is actual engineering.
You mean you wouldn't expect a software engineer to understand the coefficient of thermal expansion of tungsten carbide in a gas lubricated piston/cylinder pneumatic deadweight calibration system?
Yeah, me either. But I would expect one to know how to research the documentation to find out what it meant.
And software development isn't actually development. They don't build houses!
The only real software engineer anymore is Linus Torvalds, everyone else stands on the shoulders of giants.
Are you doing that thing where you troll by saying something really stupid and wait for others to correct you?
they should also ban web developers who refer to themselves as ninjas, especially code ninjas
Honestly, nobody should call themselves an engineer unless they literally drive trains for a living.
Driving a train is engineering?
In North America, the driver of a train engine is called an "engineer", yes.
I see, TIL. That's different from Germany, where Ingenieur is a protected term.
In the railway context an engineer was the person who worked the engine.
In German the word comes from Latin roughly meaning inventor. Presumably the general usage of the word engineer in English has the same etymology.
Infrastructure erasure in the states is so bad that people who build it for a living aren't even considered anymore.
I mean who cares? But also why? My old job title was "software engineer" and I just did web dev.
it's satire
I mean, engineering is really problem solving, and not do we web developers solve problems. We may have made most of them ourselves, and new ones when we solve those, but we do solve problems.
As a non-software engineer, feels weird that they're making this distinction.
I don't have much to do with engines either.
I take engineer to mean: designs stuff that does some task, involving SOME kind of calculation.
Visual designer: not an engineer
Piping designer: not an engineer (although this one felt weird, that's what the piping designer corrected me to say, so)
Chemical engineer: ya
Mechanical engineer: yeah
Software engineer: totally different flavour, but still yeah
Language is what we want it to be.
Web designers presumably still need to script things, I reckon that counts 👍
As long as they don't start building tunnels under their house because they're an 'engineer'...
I get this is satire but people truly believe this. Web devs literally create software that runs nearly every facet of modern life.
Now this is the kind of 'news' I'd like to see posted on hackernews just to read their techbro shit takes.
@LinearArray Deleted Tinder around a week ago.
It used to be really good back in 2012-2014 but not anymore I think.
I perused the comments and didn't see anyone mention this. The term "engineer" is regulated by every state in the US. I doubt they had Tinder in mind, but calling yourself an "engineer" without having a Professional Engineer license is illegal, at least when it comes to offering professional engineering services. It's a protected title so that schools and bridges don't get built by scammers--at least that was the intention. I can legally call myself an Engineer!
Just go get your license, and you should be golden lol.
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