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Comment by copx | Hacker News Reader

American programmers like to think they are engineers. German ones cannot because "engineer" is a legally protected title here and programming is not recognized as an engineering discipline.

I think that is justified by the way. Programming is a fad / fashion driven industry more than anything.

This is relevant here because whenever I look at Ada source code I hear synth pop. It is so 1980s. Sorry, maybe if Google or some other hip company took Ada, and simply changed the superficial appearance (i.e. syntax, identifier names) to look more 2010ish, gave it a cool name, and marketed it as the hot new thing it might go somewhere.

Sad fact is, whatever merits Ada has or does not have is completely irrelevant until that happens.

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It used to be that only mechanical engineering was engineering. Now we have civil, chemical, electrical, et cetera. What is happening to software engineering is quite similar to what happened to other branches of engineering. The main difference is that the cost of producing software is usually dominated by design and labor costs (but not always). Before we had a grand tradition of aerospace engineering there were a couple bicycle manufacturers who strapped wings to their contraptions and tested them in a wind tunnel. The dawn of aerospace was all about fashion the same way you describe software engineering today: rock stars cavorting about the globe designing airplanes out of wood, cloth, and instinct, all to adoring crowds.

But the reason it seems like software is all about fashion is because you are browsing Hacker News. Hacker News is a fashion website for computer hackers, not unlike Wired but without its own articles. If you go look at actual software companies you will find a lot more reliance on well-researched tools and techniques. If you restrict yourself to places where other costs outweigh design costs, you'll see that it's much more familiar. Look at the software engineering effort for the STS, for example. Incredibly low defect rate.

The last time I looked (which was about a decade ago) the teaching of software engineering at the masters level seemed to be mostly concerned with process management, without any real equivalent of engineering's foundation in the physical sciences. In particular, the coverage of software design was mostly reduced to rules-of-thumb, some quality metrics of dubious relevance, and especially to documenting the result.

... and especially to documenting the result.

Well, that's enough for ISO 9001, so that should be enough for engineering, right?

It is called Rust.

Besides, Ada is actually being used a lot in high integrity systems, just not on the Facebook clone of the month.

Sounds like you needs someone like Rex to give Ada an image upgrade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRbY3TMUcgQ ; it can be like Outlaw Techno Psychobitch aka Erlang.

Seriously though, I agree with you on the first part, we throw the title engineer around a lot more than we should on this side of the pond.

> I think that is justified by the way. Programming is a fad / fashion driven industry more than anything.

I do not disagree with the latter statement, but for the most part I consider myself a software engineer. I have a degree in CS, and my approach to making components for our systems is very much engineer like. I design, develop, test, evaluate, modify, install, inspect and maintain a system where I have applied science and theory to make to solution work. I have not have the pleasure to work with hardcore mathmaticians yet, but I hope I will some day.

I agree that developers that never touch the backbone and algorithms probably aren't doing engineering, at least not in the theory and science way, but saying that no developer is an engineer is wrong.

Probably explains why Germany is such a powerhouse in software development NOT.

I do wonder about the effect of all the bright kids who would do CS/Computing in the USA/Uk instead want to work for Audi.

Rigid hierarchies do have down sides until recently get put on the vocational track in the German school system that was it you where on it for life and it was almost impossible to go from Aprentice-> Technician to Engineer.

I think the title is less of a problem. It's more of a mental problem what software engineering (or developing or whatever) is about. In Germany there seems to a dominant opinion that sw development is easy and can be done by everyone. And therefore it can easily be outsourced. You will never get a big reputation (and a big salary) as a sw developer in most german companies - because thoughts are that working on requirements and coordinating projects are the more important things. Quite sad this situation. Especially when you consider the horrible quality of the SW developed in such (outsourcing) models.

I'm sure if you really want to sw development you would probably be better of working in USA/Uk than at Audi. Working on a direct competitor in germany, and I'm knowing the situation of the industry in the meantime quite well.

I Used Audi as they where reported as the most desired employer for engineers in Germany.

It might not be a powerhouse but it's fairly stable/good. There's at least one major player (SAP) there's plenty of companies in future fields (Metaio for AR for example) and there's a lot of in house stuff. There's also sort of an "alternative OS" tradition (Suse, yellowTAB). There's also more of a focus on business software (SAP influence might shine through) imo (the difference between Wirtschaftsinformatik and Information Systems has been discussed at length in journals)

Berlin is one of the better non-SV startup locations from what I hear.

Ah SAP one of those products that promises the moon on a stick and requires expensive SAP consultants to configure - worse than Oracle from what I am told

"There's at least one major player (SAP)..."

I'm not very familiar with any of the other examples you mention, but, uh,....

Have you ever gone anywhere near SAP?

I've worked for a competitor. Independent of the quality of their products SAP is still a big software company and the German software marked makes up roughly 50% of the entire European market. At least that was the case around 2012 haven't checked since (SAP alone is responsible for most of it). My point is merely that Germany is hardly a software wasteland and the assertion that "the talented people flock to traditional engineering" is somewhat dubious (imo).

There's some cultural indicators that programming is a topic of interest as well (the existence and size of the CCC for example).

Well, it explains why off-shoring companies have such a hard time with German customers.

The quality expectation is a bit higher than what other countries are willing to accept.

In the US, the legally-protected title is Professional Engineer. I switched majors from CS to CS & Engineering because of the former was not accredited to allow becoming a PE, whereas the latter is recognized by the PE licensuring body. http://www.nspe.org/resources/licensure/what-pe

Some subfields of computer science are indisputably engineering. The line between being an engineer and a code monkey is a thin one anyway.

I don't get why "engineer" is held in such a high esteem. As for myself, you can call me Cowboy Coder Cody (CCC for short) if that's what you prefer.

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