Programmers: Stop Calling Yourselves Engineers (2015)
I still find this sentiment hurtful after all these years. It comes across as demeaning of my credentials and my work.<p>Let&#x27;s start with my degree. My master&#x27;s degree reads &quot;Informatics Engineer&quot;, a title that was approved at the national level by the EU country where I graduated. That alone should be sufficient in my opinion.<p>Degrees don&#x27;t matter? What about people? When the exact work I do is performed by &quot;true Engineers&quot; then does that make it true enfineering? Most of my co-workers are Electronics Engineers and while they perform the same tasks I do, I have yet to see anybody question their worth.<p>Or perhaps my colleagues may be true Engineers, but the work they are doing is mere programming, as evidenced by a simple programmer like me doing it.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s the processes we follow that matter. True engineering work involves design, documentation and review processes, after all. Well, the processes we follow come directly from EE best practices because that&#x27;s the nature of the work we do (computer architecture). Software engineering also has its own similar design processes tailored to their needs. Not significantly different, I must say.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s not the accreditation, the people or the processes. Perhaps the demarcation between engineering and programming is in the systems we design. They must be designs worthy of being patented, systems so important that people&#x27;s lives are at risk if they malfunction.<p>I have a dozen patents -- none of them in software. I have worked on safety critical systems where death and dismemberment were expected consequences of malfunction. Importantly, not all &quot;true engineers&quot; work on safety critical systems either.<p>What else, then? The article talks about certification -- I wish they allowed us to become licensed so that we had less competition and higher software engineering standards.