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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

Me too. And this is why it sort of rubs me the wrong way when people building chat apps call themselves engineers.

Well this is the most casually elitist thing I've read in a long time.

Anyone that's gotten through a 200 level programming course can probably throw together some kind of chat program that will let a few people talk.

That's lightyears from a scalable, non-buggy, chat system with modern features deployed at scale.

True, but there are still no lives on the line. And no personal liability (beyond maybe losing your job) for mistakes you make.

What defines an "engineer", the work or the risks?

Some mélangée of responsibility, liability, accountability, and legal authority to approve things for usage.

This can actually vary depending on where you are in the world. There are places, like Canada, where the term engineer has a specific definition under the law, and it includes things such as professional ethics and liability.

Is gatekeeping like this necessary?

It's not so much that it's gatekeeping, but there's a big difference between writing bloated Electron applications with few, if any, constraints vs. writing Ada in an extremely constrained environment where there's memory constraints and other overhead that doesn't exist in the web development realm. If the former fails, a user gets slightly annoyed. If the latter fails, people die. One takes way more skill/training than the other. To treat the two on the same level is insincere at best.

It doesn't take substantially different training beyond recognizing that one is applying a different tool in a different environment.

It's all programming. Different patterns, stacks, and pressure to test? Yes. Fundamentally the same work loop, however. I'd advise against raising one level of endeavor over another. It seldom produces substantive or useful conversation.

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