Yeah, same in the UK. Really annoyed me that the plumber, electrician… etc were all engineers. In Germany it’s as protected as calling yourself doctor, which ultimately affects how people view the profession and the salaries they command
I mean, it’s a protected term in Canada too but it doesn’t necessarily lead to higher salaries.
My cousin who’s an electrician made about as much as I did as an electrical engineer, and I left electrical engineering to be a software developer because it paid more. Engineering paid more than being an electrical technician / designer, but not by a huge amount.
I left aeronautical engineering to become a software “engineer” for similar reasons, salary and work culture. Actual engineering pays quite terribly in the UK, it’s a fair bit better in Germany or the US from what I hear.
Yeah it’s difficult for me to name my title in English 'cause the word doesn’t exist. I went to a technical high school, not university. (Not college!)
It does not only dictate your professional life/status in Germany, being a doctor, your social as well. Someone I know got a postdoc in germany, no luck finding a place to live until they started asking their german collegues to call and saying “doctor so-and-so is looking for an appartment”. So, he gets one. The guy has a very long full name, so the nametag the landlord is gonna put on the postbox is way to long, but if you cut off the part where it says he is a doctor, it would fit. He insists to cut that part away, the landlord just refuses, says fuck your name and person basically, and cuts off part of his last name instead. Saying you are a doctor gets you first in fucking everything (maybe not lufthansa, then they just say ‘senators’ or something). Extremely class divided social society that.
Hmmm. But all the people around me working in software studied multiple years in an Engineering field. In my case, I studied a 5-year industrial engineering and two masters afterwards; I feel very comfortable wearing the “software engineer” or more accurately “robotics engineer” badge.
No, that’s precisely the opposite of my point. If you drive an Uber, you’re an Uber driver. People are “CEO” or “Judge” despite nobody having a CEO or Judge degree. Your profession is what you do, not what you happened to study in your teens to get there.
I understand your point now and I agree. Your colleagues that studied engineering became programmers. Why do people treat this as if that’s bad? It’s a beautiful profession.
I don’t think it’s bad, in fact I wonder the same. These are my colleagues because it’s the same path I took - I now work developing self-driving cars (I slowly transitioned from aerospace to manufacturing automation to robotics) and it’s the most rewarding job I’ve ever had, and it feels very much like engineering. I don’t care if I’m not a “manufacturing engineer” anymore; I really like my job and I like my title to reflect somewhat accurately what I do, but that’s the extent I care about it.
How come they don’t count? They’re figuring out how the machines should work, for money. That’s engineering, right? (I’m an American mechanical engineer)
In Canada you have to be qualified and licensed to call yourself an engineer. There are people who can use the title “software engineer”, but it’s not the majority of people working in development.
Softwareingenieur darf man sich nennen, wenn man ein mathematisch-naturwissenschaftliches Fach studiert hat, wo Informatik dazugehört. Somit ist Software Engineer oder Softwareingenieur die korrekte Berufsbezeichnung für alle mit einem Bachelor/Master oder höher in Informatik.
That is not entirely true. It’s a bit more complicated. Yes it is protected since the 1970s but it’s more of an academic title. You needed to study something that is “mainly” of technological or scientific nature. Basically befire the Bologna reform every student in Tec. Unis/FHs did get the title Diplom-Ingenieur. So the engineer part was literally part of your degree. This of course also true in case you studied IT. So yes there are many who call themselves IT engineers also in Germany. However it’s more of a philosophical question how much software development is actually engineering or rather craftsmanship.
Yeah, you can technically write object oriented code in C. Or any other language. Just that actual OOP languages provide a nicer syntax and compile time checks.
Rust is kind of a good example of this. It’s technically not an object oriented language, but the trait system brings it close.
“Look at you, hacker: a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?” -Shodan
My job title has changed 5x more than my actual job. I honestly don’t even know what my current title is.
I wonder how many man-hours (and at what average salary) has been spent deciding on title changes that have literally zero impact at my company. I’m sure every change involves meetings full of highly-paid executives.
“I (want to keep my job and therefore I) AGREE WITH YOU 100%”
They collect the big bucks, the rest of us can suck dirt - barely not able to afford a home, food, medical care, etc. Oh wait, sorry, I meant “YES SIR/MAM!”
I’m technically an aerospace engineer, but all I do is code most days. I think it depends highly on what you do, since my job also involves doing things not strictly coding related as well, I always slap the engineer title next to it. If you only code, then it’s more appropriate to say software dev, or programmer. But, again its highly dependent on your role.
And as other people have mentioned, seems like outside the U.S. the term engineer is a protected title, so my take really only applies within the U.S.
I would say tho, a lot of programmers in the U.S. do get called software engineers. Just depends on where you go I guess.
I don’t think what you study in your degree is the defining factor. Obviously this is country-specific but I feel you job title isn’t always linked 1:1 to your title.
I studied Industrial Engineering, which in Spain exists as a degree but not as a job position. Position wise, I’ve been a mechanical design engineer, a manufacturing engineer, an automation engineer, robotics engineer, and these days I’m mostly a software engineer. I’m definitely specialised in engineering, regardless of the tools I’m applying to solve the task at hand.
I’m in tech and “computer programmer” has always sounded to me like a grandma phrase. Like how all gaming consoles are referred to as “the Nintendo” or “the game station”.
I remember telling my high school guidance counsellor I was planning on becoming a programmer. She looked at me, head tilted like a confused dog and asked what excited me about Event Programming (as in, planning and scheduling large in-person events).
That was the first time someone didn’t understand what I did for work, and it was about 5 years before I started doing it.
That’s funny, plain “programmer” would be my preferred term if it weren’t for the fact that non-tech folks think it sounds like menial work. I’ve landed on “software engineer” because that’s what my employer calls me and other people seem to understand a little bit, too.
Here in Canada you can’t call yourself an engineer unless you are a qualified and licensed engineer. So most people have to call themselves “developer”. When you see someone calling themselves a software engineer it should mean something.
I was hired with the official title “software engineer,” then I was noted in all unofficial org charts as a “SE/DE” (software engineer/data engineer), and recently my boss announced that I have had my title officially changed to “data engineer”. My job functions have not changed the entire time I’ve been here. I write Python, SQL, KQL and Pyspark scripts and have to fuck around with Azure architecture sometimes. So there’s not always clear delineation between these terms, anyway.
Lol, are you me? Job application said software engineer. 3 months after I was hired, it changed to data engineer with no changes to the work I do. I wasn’t even notified, just noticed on a random day that the role on my profile on Teams had changed. I also do Python, SQL, and Pyspark scripts, but use AWS instead.
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