If the author went a little bit deeper they might be able to make the same arguments about how the title "Engineer" has lost a lot of meaning in the public due to the cavalier attitude with which many organizations throw it around.
If the author went a little bit deeper they might be able to make the same arguments about how the title "Engineer" has lost a lot of meaning in the public due to the cavalier attitude with which many organizations throw it around.
We have the formal designation of "professional engineer" (PE) but outside of civil and mechanical engineering (and some government work) it's not that meaningful. You have to complete a 4-year degree at an accredited institution, pass some licensing tests, and then apprentice under a licensed PE for four more years before you can earn a PE license.
In some states you can't legally call yourself an "engineer" without your PE license but I have never seen it enforced. I live in one such state, I'm not a PE, I call myself an engineer, I've worked with engineers for years, and even the entry level jobs in this state the title is "engineer." No one cares about it and not many people see it as worth much, unless they're doing engineering work for local governments in which case it's required.
Not surprisingly, it just makes that work more expensive for everyone involved.
Creating barriers to entry that benefit existing players in the market are not good if they don't add value. For certain projects where there is legal liability (like building a bridge, and some human needs to certify it's "good" and if they're wrong, people die), that makes sense. For everyone else it just adds overhead that doesn't need to be there.
And given that the US has led the world in engineering for the back half of the 20th century, the attitude that there must be some professional licensing body to tell us who is and is not an engineer is nothing if not smug and elitist. Some of the best software is built by people who would never have become PEs, and the entire establishment is contrary to innovation.
Even in things like civil engineering jobs, not all of the work is done by the PE, they just need to review it as if it was their own work. Some tech industries taking over critical parts of life could use oversight like that.
But the whole PE thing is nonsense. We can get around this with malpractice policies/insurance and still have a qualified human certifying things, and reasonable bodies rejecting that certification if they don't feel the human that does it is up to snuff. The whole PE dance is just a dog and pony show.
Which, I get that not everyone agrees on licensing law and philosophy, but it should at least signify mastery of the topic via formal education or apprenticeship.
Most PEs have both of those, engineering degree and licensing internship.
How many SWEs have either? I honestly don't know.
If you don't have either, you are at best senior technician, which should be respectable enough, but for title inflation.
> How many SWEs have either? I honestly don't know.
Almost all of them, in practice.
> If you don't have either, you are at best senior technician, which should be respectable enough, but for title inflation.
Engineering as a discipline is much older and nuanced than PE licensing bodies. If you are applying the science and practice of problem analysis and design synthesis you are an engineer.
You may or may not be aware of this but Oregon at least tried to enforce this:
https://www.nspe.org/resources/issues-and-advocacy/latest-ne...
In those states, the local governments should be required to only use software from vendors where all the "software engineers" (i.e. every employee that uses that title) in that company actually have PE licenses, including Microsoft.
In other countries like Canada, the title is just s/Engineer/Developer.
To add, the author is talking about the levels no longer indicating experience due to level inflation. Not word semantics along the lines of “senior no longer means the oldest on their team”.
Titles don't intrinsically mean anything. They cost nothing to assign, and have no requirements.
So the only people complaining about titles being inflated are those to whom they have "meaning". And the only reason they're being inflated in the first place is because the same folk want "better sounding titles".
They're given out like candy to those who want candy.
Personally, I go the other way. I don't have a fancy title, and I don't want a fancy title. I don't need a title to earn social credit or impress an interviewer. I have my achievements for that.
But of course, to those who are impressed by titles feel free to call yourself anything you like. There are no qualifications or skillsets required.
You seem to agree title inflation is common and you say fancy titles are given out like candy. If everyone easily gets promotions, what does that say about someone who’s not given such easy candy?
Where I work, pay is based on skills, experience, quality and value of work produced. I can call myself "programming super-god" if I like but that has no effect on my pay. Some companies just have pay levels and you're an L5 or whatever.
So you are ignorant to the reality that it is meaningful and has some value, that value is debatable and subjective, but it can and does have actual value. You're stuck on your own narrow minded meritocracy mindset, which is noble and pure, but also extremely naive to how the world actually works at large.
> Where I work, pay is based on skills, experience, quality and value of work produced.
Reducing to N=1 doesn't help your argument. Quite the opposite. I think we're all in agreement it would be convenient if titles and levels were normalized across the industry / globe but they never will be. I'm glad you found an employer that works for your preference. But if you ever search widely for another job, and want to optimize your earnings, a big title will come in handy and have value. You can stick to your guns, but you are experiencing an opportunity cost by being stubborn on this and not seeking bigger titles. You'll never know how much more you could have been paid had you came with a big title and made them think you were worth way more than they wanted to pay.
In a world where pay is tied to public-facing titles I can look around, recognize that I'm doing more and better work than people with a higher title than me, and push for a promotion.
In the world you describe (absent salary transparency), how do you know if you're getting underpaid relative to peers?
Another great resource I've found is Practical Engineering. Listening to his videos it's easy to see how much overlap there is between our ways of thinking and interacting with the world.
As for the legal side, as others have noted in most of the US "engineer" in the abstract isn't legally protected. So there's no legal problem with using the title, and engineers who've done both don't consider our practices to be somehow lesser.
Yes, there is no formal standard or certification, and that opens the door for charlatans and sloppy crap.
No, designing and implementing software systems well requires planning, fail safes, redundancy and all kind of things "physical" engineers deal with.
It may be time to certify to differentiate between script kiddies and the folks managing the software systems that back our modern world.
Would you get surgery from someone in a back alley? Is that credentialist crap?
This industry is still within memory of the first digital computers. Now we have lots of rote work, some interesting and novel areas, and a small sliver of wacky innovation. But I think many here cherish that self-image of the self-taught inventor… this is “hacker” news after all. I for one am not ready to give someone undue credibility because of a title or piece of paper.
Why do you need credentials to differentiate these two?
Software has built a lot of modern toys but it still plays a relatively limited role in the world of atoms rather than bits, but I suspect the value of credentials is going to appreciate as that changes over the next few decades.
Degrees that the people who wrote software you regard well probably didn't have, and people writing software you dislike do? Quickly outdated written tests? Years of experience when a common refrain is 1 year of experience x times?
I work with safety critical systems. I still haven't found a better way to evaluate people than having a conversation because none of the overt metrics have correlated well with my "won't get people killed" rating.
I'm not advocating for senseless beaurocratic hurdles, but you have to admit that standards for software have fallen as more people have entered the industry.
The English definition of "doctor" is not a vague term. It has two common usages, both of which share the concept of one having an advanced degree[0].
a person who has earned one of the highest academic degrees
(such as a PhD) conferred by a university
a person skilled or specializing in healing arts
0 - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doctorIn (Middle) English, the earliest recorded use of "doctor" was for church fathers in 1303, but you'd find it widely used for teachers and any knowledgeable person - including medical doctors - as the 13th century goes on.
The codification of the Doctor of Medicine degree and license seems only started in the 18th century[1], but doctors of theology and law far predated that (somewhere in the 12th century I think). Even the PhD (i.e. doctor of philosophy) degree appears to predate the medical doctor degree by half a century.
[1]: https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/medicine/mus/ourfacilities/his...
At some point an expectation developed that practitioners of medicine actually had some formal qualifications and eventually to most people Doctor became synonymous with Physician.