Software Engineering ≠ Computer Science (2009)
I&#x27;ve seen similar articles to this one, both in print and on web sites. I used to explain it to people as the difference between &#x27;coders&#x27; and &#x27;engineers&#x27; but I think my own hubris at having a degree got in the way of my thinking on it.<p>Over the decades I&#x27;ve met a bunch of people who program computers for a living, and there is clearly a spectrum where on one end is a person who spends the weekend benchmarking different sort algorithms under different conditions for the fun of it, and the guy who left the office at 5PM once an integration test passed on a piece of code that he pasted in from stack overflow was deemed to have no regressions. There are many different disciplines that have such a wide dynamic, from chefs who spend their weekends trying different flavors to cooks who take frozen patties out, reheat them and serve. Painters who throw human emotion into a painting and painters who lay down a yellow line on a road according to a template for $20&#x2F;hr.<p>It seems to me that most, of not all, of the &#x27;theory&#x27; stuff in computer science is just math of one form or another. This is not unlike all the &#x27;theory&#x27; stuff in electrical engineering is just physics. You can do the tasks without the theory, but you rarely invent new ways of doing things without that understanding.<p>But just like carpenters and architects there is a tremendous amount of depth in the crafting of things. That brilliance should be respected, college trained or not, so trying to &#x27;split&#x27; the pool doesn&#x27;t lead to any good insights about what being a good engineer is all about.