I just lost my job as a civil engineer and I’ve been trying to find resources, forums, staffing agencies, etc to help land me a job and all of what’s out there online talks about faang, leetcode, programming bullshit, etc. Call yourselves Computer scientists, programmers, hogs, i don’t care, please for the love just stop dominating all the ‘engineering’ discourse.
I believe there is such a thing as software engineering, but it describes a minuscule fraction of the amount of work which takes place in the field.
I mean, true, a lot of people call software design "engineering," but as someone whose job title is literally "software engineer" (who has, in fact, designed software from the ground up) I have to point out that it's really not engineering in the traditional sense. Real engineers take the FE and the PE, and they stamp their designs (meaning that if those designs result in catastrophic failure that leads to injury or death, that engineer is on the hook for that). None of that applies to me. So OP's point is totally valid.
I agree. What I'm referring to is the kind of stuff that goes into flight control systems, nuclear reactors, industrial robotics, etc. The kind of software that will get people killed if it malfunctions. This kind of stuff is built with a completely different methodology than consumer / enterprise applications. For instance, in avionics they design the entire system so it does absolutely no dynamic memory allocation whatsoever.
Til about malloc unpredictability
That's fair, although I suspect most of the people programming systems like that have degrees in real engineering, not just computer science.
I had a colleague who had a software engineering degree, but at his school it was actually in the school of engineering and he had to take all of the same core physics classes as the real engineers.
Seems like a waste of effort since we were doing the same job, him with a MS in Engineering and me with a BS in CS.
I don't think software engineering has an established PE yet. I think those systems fall under ECE and most universities prepare the software engineers for the ECE PE exams. Might be wrong on that though.
Most real engineers don't have a PE either, lol. I know engineers nearing retirement who never got their PE.
I mean, yeah, but somebody on the job has to have taken it, right? That was my understanding.
Sure, but also you wouldn't say the overwhelming majority of engineering work isn't real engineering work because it was done by people who didn't need to get the PE designation.
A lot of shops have one engineer with a stamp and dozens of draftsmen that are just paid draftsman wages for permit and design drawings.
Where I'm at, the resident PE literally just puts a stamp on our work.
I know we probably couldn't have developed the web as it is today as quickly without allowing anybody who can write code to be a "software engineer", but imo that sort of protection should apply to the title and we should demand more of our software developers