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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

"Engineer" conveys image of middle class white-collar job with relatively high status, good education and responsibilities. That word now used for everyone doing programming related jobs inside office space for no good reason.

I think the word "tehnician" should be used to describe most grey-collar ICT jobs, including most programmers. Their responsibility and scope of their work is limited. Many programming jobs are closer to blue collar factory level mechanic than engineer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-collar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technician

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Yup. The reality of this industry is that most programmers are closer to the handymen you call to fix your faucet or lay floor tiles than to actual engineers. And we all have first-hand or second-hand horror stories related to handymen.

I've come to the conclusion recently that we're all just barbers, bloodletting and burring holes. Until we have proper certifiable and reproducible competency, we'll never become surgeons.

And yet the US has consistently been in the vanguard of software development worldwide. Do we need surgeons? Do you need a four year postgraduate degree and three more years of apprenticeship before slinging together a web app? Certainly the industry has its problems, and some applications demand more rigor, but I don’t see this as much of a general solution.

The market didn't demand a high survival rate or efficacy for barbering either, but do you think that the (conscious or unconscious) that software engineers are some sort of magical wizards will last forever?

There may be explanations beyond wizardry - e.g. maybe barbers were historically often self-employed, small business owners who realized they stood to gain from creating barriers to entry such as licensing requirements.

Don't you need a license to be a barber?

In modern times yes, here's some interesting reading on the guilds licensing originated from - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worshipful_Company_of_Barbers

Thankfully there are countries where Engineer is still a proper word, not something that you are allowed to call yourself after a 6 month bootcamp.

And still others have, though it may not be appreciated in all industries, _Chartered_ Engineers.

Yup, in the UK it bugs me when I keep meeting people who introduce themselves as an 'engineer'. When I ask them if they do mechanical or civil engineering, then I usually get to say "ah, so you're a programmer, just like me".

One thing I did sometimes like about being in Austria is the obsession with academic titles they have there... if somebody is a qualified engineer, they invariably use "Ing" as a title in place of "Mr" or "Ms"; people with two doctorates (not uncommon) really do call themselves Dr Dr So-and-so.

What is qualified in Austria? In the USA, in most states, you must be licensed to have engineering in your business name. Your name is usually suffixed with PE.

But in the USA you can refer to yourself generically as a Software Engineer without any formal education.

Yes. I don’t think there is even a PE licensing path for software, so even with a CS degree you could never become a licensed engineer. You have to work under a PE for 5 years, then take the PE exam, then CE credits.

I have an MSEE, but can’t put engineer in my title. Though Ing. sounds kind of cool.

There actually was a PE for Software Engineering, but it is being discontinued, because almost no one took it.

https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineerin...

Wow, didn’t know they had one. I wonder how they handle the licensing as there would be no one to complete the 5 year understudy; chicken and the egg.

To use the "Ing" title you have to have a certain education and a few years of practice. To be honest, it doesn't mean much.

Still doesn’t really mean anything. Due to a loophole in major assignment I can legally call myself Ing., but what I’ve really studied is more or less computer science.

Austrian here. "Ing" (Ingenieur, so basically Engineer) is a protected title (not an academic one, though) but to be honest, it does not signal status or qualification to me. The actual academic titles are worth more.

How dare you leave out electrical engineering!

It bothers me to no end when I hear programmers here in Ontario call themselves engineers when they neither graduated from an engineering program nor completed their PEO exam. It's very much illegal, and the PEO _will_ go after companies that allow their employees to title themselves as engineers.

And most states in the US too. Just rarely enforced. Only a licensed PE can do business as an “Engineer”. (For example have a company with the word Engineer or Engineering in the name).

Protected term in Canada as well, but I don't know the last time anyone that was used against in any level of court. During my education there was a case study of some guy digging basements calling himself an engineer when he wasn't but that's about it.

I believe the city of Portland OR recently sued a Danish man for "practicing engineering without a license". They were upset at him for generating strong proof of shortened yellow light times at intersections with red light cameras. He had a degree (and I believe a certificate) from Europe, but it wasn't recognized by the Authorities.

That said, there's many variants that are perfect valid: network engineer, sales engineer, systems engineer, etc.

And how many 'engineers' would tack on 1000x too much complexity to justify their 'engineering' effort?

software in many cases is more art than science.

I think this talk is relevant https://youtu.be/lLnsi522LS8

Please bitch "associate professional"

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