[Discuss] Programming vs Engineering

[richard.pieri at gmail.com (Richard Pieri)]

On Jan 21, 2012, at 1:39 PM, Mark Woodward wrote:
> 
> Does anyone have any comment?

Yeah, but it's more rant than anything else.  You've been warned.


The title "Engineer" has a specific, legal meaning.  Professional use of the Engineer title requires rigorous education, testing, internship and licensure.  None of these exist for professional programmers.  Therefore, there are no Professional Software Engineers, regardless of what is on our business cards[1].  All of this also applies to the "Architect" title.  Architects have similar education and testing requirements to Engineers, and like Engineers they must be licensed to practice professionally.  Use of the Engineer and Architect titles for computer specialists is nothing more than aggrandizement.

In my book, your exemplar "good software engineer" is really a good programmer, and your "good programmer" is anything but good.  He is terrible.  He'll write "correct", "clean" code that will be five to ten times slower than the good programmers' painstakingly optimized code.  Then he'll go and rewrite their code to "clean it up" to match his own and check it in without telling anyone.  Then the next release candidate suffers catastrophic performance problems and a mad scramble to figure out why ensues.  Someone at a previous job of mine did this, and the senior management was not amused.  Bad programmer, no biscuit.

Rant off.

[1] My title at my last gig was "Senior Systems Engineer".  I hated that title and I hate putting it on my resume because it is a lie.  I'm no Engineer.

--Rich P.