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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

School has very little to do with why software developers shouldn't call themselves engineers. Virtually nobody in our industry actually practices "engineering", in part because the industry is structured around staffing and scheduling incompatible with "engineering".

Having said that, this is a hacker/cracker debate; the ship has sailed on calling developers (and tech employees) "engineers".

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How much is this misnaming the fault of companies, how much is this the fault of schools, and how much of this is the fault of society in general?

From my recollection, Software Engineering became A Thing at schools long before companies started calling their employees Software Engineers.

My general thinking is that engineering is a more practical application of science. Colleges don't have a Department of Development. They have a Department of Engineering. So even though it doesn't quite fit, maybe we can just stick the degree in the engineering department and obviously call it Software Engineering.

So schools do this - they create this "engineering" discipline that doesn't quite fit engineering. It seems obvious that companies and people are going to then follow.

Curious when your recollection starts.

I remember when I was looking at schools (~1990) many schools didn't even have a separate computer science degree, much less software engineering. Often it was a sub-degree in the math department. OTOH I'm pretty sure 'software engineer' as a title was already well under way by then.

Around 2003, when I graduated. For what its worth, our computer science department was a part of the math department when I first went there, but got moved to the science department halfway through.

Maybe it was just the jobs I was looking at. They all had "programmer" or "developer" in the title. But it was around when programmer started becoming bad, and over the next 4 or so years they all started morphing into "engineer".

When I started undergrad in 1996 CS was pretty common.

Actually I think its very central-its almost a badge of honor to brag that you didn't waste so much money on college, and that you self taught yourself at a young age on Assembly/Basic/Perl/PHP/C/Slackware/etc. There's definitely a lot of pride in being called an engineer without a BS (much less a BS in CS).

That's actually a far more interesting argument against calling people "engineers" than accusing them of not having skills netted from a formal education.

I agree with you though. It's like holding on to "literally" being used solely for the opposite of "figuratively." It's pointless.

Hmm remind me again which university Brunel went to - he actually did an apprenticeship with a clock maker and learnt on the Job :-)

I have a B.S. in Software Engineering and I do in fact practice engineering on software systems. However, admittedly, I may be in the minority in terms of both education and practical application.

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