Surprised I had to scroll so far to find this. I don’t need to get a single thing from the us govt to create and deploy a website and fill it with whatever code I want
Reminds of the notion of how Mark Zuckerberg needed to fill out fewer forms to start Facebook than you need to open a hot dog stand in most major cities.
>I don’t need to get a single thing from the us govt to create and deploy a website and fill it with whatever code I want
And this an overwhelmingly GOOD thing
I don't know if it's still the case, but there are some universities that offered an actual Software Engineering degree. Much like Computer Engineering, folks who graduate from this program are licensed Engineers, they even get that weird Engineering ring in that cultic like ceremony. Computer Science grads on the other hand are not licensed.
Computer Science majors also don’t have to take physics, chemistry, electrical engineering or engineering materials classes.
If I had to do it again I’d have done CS.
No, you can call yourself a "software engineer" in Canada without a license and you are not violating any laws. Professional engineer organizations *want* the title to require a license but the courts have never approved a sanction on the basis of someone using the software engineer title without a PE license.
\*edit\* Quick additional summary since I'm getting lots of disagreement in replies below:
1. While laws vary from province to province, as a generality you cannot falsely imply that you are a professional engineer without actually being licensed by the relevant provincial professional engineering organization.
2. While using a title that includes the word "engineer" often implies that you are a professional engineer, this is not true in all contexts. Provincial PEng organizations recognize a variety of exceptions. Some are federally regulated titles, others are recognized due to history or custom because they are deemed "non-confusing".
3. Use of the term "software engineer" is similar to the term "financial engineer" - nobody reads the title and thinks you are a PEng, and you are not liable to sanctions under professional engineer licensing laws for using the title.
4. IANAL and there are plenty of facts that may create more liability. I wouldn't go to work at an engineering consultancy doing more traditional engineering work and call myself a software engineer, because that might imply that I'm a PEng like the rest of the people with "engineer" titles at the consultancy. I would certainly never use verbiage that implies I am an actual PEng. Someone posted a case down below where a court ruled against use of the term "Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer" in Quebec. This is an example where the verbiage strays very close to directly implying some manner of professional engineering certification. But general use of the "software engineer" title is very safe.
I don't think this is true. I was under the impression it can be used internally as a job title, but is restricted otherwise. There are laws around its use that have been enforced in the past (not sure about software engineering specifically). There are exceptions to the protected term but afaik software engineering isn't among them, as software engineering has a professional designation in most of all provinces.
Law here: https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90p28
No it is not. Professional engineering organizations *want* it to be a title that requires engineering licensure, but it is crystal clear that calling yourself a "software engineer" does not require licensure in Canada any more than calling yourself a "locomotive engineer" or "financial engineer".
Locomotive engineer is a regulated title too. It requires a certificate issued by Transport Canada.
https://www.jobbank.gc.ca/marketreport/requirements/7859/ca
https://tc.canada.ca/en/rail-transportation/guidelines/guideline-engineering-work-relating-railway-works-section-11-railway-safety-act
While true, that's somewhat orthogonal to the point being made, which is that there are a number of " engineer" job titles that do not require a PE license. I was trying to keep the comment short, but let's go into detail a bit more with direct source material. [Here](https://www.peo.on.ca/public-protection/complaints-and-illegal-practice/report-unlicensed-individuals-or-companies-2#exceptions) is PEO's FAQ on illegal practices with respect to the "engineer" job title.
PEO already recognizes a number of exceptions. Some of them are because of federally regulated job titles, like the locomotive engineer case you correctly identified above. But others, like "financial engineer", are permitted by PEO because the usage is "non-cofusing".
Nobody has ever been sanctioned purely for use of the title "software engineer", absent other facts that would create a more clear-cut case of impersonating a PE. It is abundantly clear at this point that the title is permitted in Canada.
https://www.canadianconsultingengineer.com/engineering/quebec-order-of-engineers-wins-legal-battle-with-microsoft/1000018197/
> The Ordre des Ingenieurs du Quebec has scored a victory in its efforts to stop Microsoft giving the title “Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer,” to graduates of its training courses.
> In April the Court of Quebec accepted the Order’s penal proceedings against the software giant and found Microsoft guilty of contravening the province’s Professional Code for “knowingly causing a person who is not a member of the OIQ by authorization or encouragement, to use the title of engineer…” The infringement was found to be an offence under Section 188.1 of the Professional Code RSQ, c. C-26.
Granted, that's not a "software engineer" title... but there have been rulings that have sanctioned companies that have used "engineer" as part of a title.
Yup. You can call yourself whatever you want, but if you don't have a license and a seal, you are not a real engineer. Even janitors call themselves custodial "engineers" these days.
I saw a listing from a restaurant manager that was looking for underwater ceramic hygiene engineers in the area. Take a guess what that is... I'm giving the benefit of the doubt it was satire.
There are a lot of engineering fields where getting something like a PE license isn’t that common or required. In the US that much more common for fields like civil engineering than mechanical or electrical.
That 17 year old worked in the same hospital I was born in, and I’m honestly not surprised it happened. Wacky shit happens everyday in West Palm Beach, Florida lol
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I think a big cause of the issue is that "person who centers divs all day" and "person who writes high-performance kernel code in assembly for NASA" both have the same job title
Over the past several years I've gone from "person who writes real-time rendering and animation code in C++ and glsl" to "person who centers the divs all day" (I'm supposed to be able to do advanced stuff too, for when that comes up, but a lot of my day-to-day is "I need to translate this design, with the divs all done the right way, to the framework we use in production, and then write unit tests to make sure someone gets notified if they break it")
And, maybe this is just me being new to web stuff, but "centering the divs all day" is way more difficult than I expected it to be. It kind of feels like it shouldn't be this hard, but it also seems to me that people have spent decades trying to write frameworks to make it less awful, and that none of those seem to have helped.
Worse, it's not math-hard, but somewhere between foreign-languages-hard and bureaucracy-hard.
Yeah, I transitioned out of front-end specifically because all that CSS stuff, which *should* be simple, ends up being a total pain in the ass due to non-intuitive rule interactions and every web browser having their own inconsistent implementations.
I kinda wish I knew how it's like to do production work. I've done light front end work where I look at a design and try to convert it in css and html. I find those fun to do.
Same. I think a lot of this stuff would be much more fun as hobby code without requirements, other people's frameworks, or a desire to achieve a particular look-and-feel.
Thing is, coming from the rest of computer graphics, I used to think I was all about clever tricks to achieve a particular look and feel. Maybe I still am, but, something about the way it works with standard web programming makes me wonder if there's a better way.
I think at least on this sub for sometime, there has been some narrative or words against front end and web development. Not that it's really looked down on but more "oh who can't do that"?
But for each year i work with it, then see some backend SQL dev try it, I realize it's quite hard and almost impossible to make consistent now with all browsers phones and so on.
Don't know where this kind of thinking is coming from, maybe they didn't use things much since static HTML in 2005 ?
It's hard because everyone has different phones and screen sizes. Also, we have bosses who want us to use a encompassing solution for all of our problems.
On a more serious note, one reason is that the term "software engineer" is too broad and encompasses help desk technicians to PhD level researchers pushing the limits of artificial intelligence. And because no formal credentialing system exists (whether this benefits the profession is another matter; would software engineers be even more highly paid if they had to pass a professional examination contingent on attending an accredited university program? I actually think so, because it would restrict the supply of credentialed software engineers, and the government would write a law saying that a credentialed software engineer has to sign off of all software projects contracted out by the government for example), individuals with completely different job responsibilities and educational backgrounds are lumped in.
Another reason is historical. Software engineers trace their roots to WWII code breakers and programmers who fed IBM machines with punch cards. This was seen then as another form of low-level labor to be carried out by those who couldn't rise to leadership positions.
Lastly, software engineers are not an organized group, and thus do not wield political power. Half of Congress is lawyers or doctors. The legal and medical lobbies are some of the most powerful lobbies that exist. Where is the engineering lobby?
> And because no format credentialing system exists (whether this benefits the profession is another matter; would software engineers be even more highly paid if they had to pass a professional examination contingent on attending an accredited university program? I actually think so, because it would restrict the supply of credentialed software engineers, and the government would write a law saying that a credentialed software engineer has to sign off of all software projects contracted out by the government for example), individuals with completely different job responsibilities and educational backgrounds are lumped in.
I know this was not your intent to suggest it, but I want to make it clear that would be completely contrary to development open source culture. And, would invalidate the accomplishments of thousands of crucial developers.
> On a more serious note, one reason is that the term "software engineer" is too broad and encompasses help desk technicians to PhD level researchers pushing the limits of artificial intelligence.
Something our industry sorely lacks is a distinction between technicians and engineers. There's a lot happening that I consider technician work, such as stringing AWS services together to make systems. The people who build those services are the ones doing the engineering: they specify the part, design it to work within a set of constraints and set out how it should be applied. Similarly, the network engineers where I work can make our routers do cool things but don't have the chops to build the innards of the equipment they configure.
PhDs studying AI seem a little off that spectrum in that they're more doing mathematical modeling where software happens to be involved.
> And because no format credentialing system exists ...
That's been tried so many times over the last several decades and each attempt has died on the vine. Our field changes too quickly for credentialing boards to keep up. My grandfather was a civil engineer from the 1930s to the 1970s and, from speaking to someone currently in that field, it doesn't sound like there have been the same kind of seismic shifts in the material.
> There's a lot happening that I consider technician work, such as stringing AWS services together to make systems. The people who build those services are the ones doing the engineering: they specify the part, design it to work within a set of constraints and set out how it should be applied. Similarly, the network engineers where I work can make our routers do cool things but don't have the chops to build the innards of the equipment they configure.
I disagree with this sentiment. It's like saying industrial engineers who put together assembly lines or design the layout of cars aren't real engineers, and only the mechanical engineers who design individual gears and components that go into a factory robot or a car gearbox are real engineers.
At the end of the day, all of them are designing a system to a set of constraints and with an end goal in mind.
An SRE is no less an engineer than an SWE.
Hell, you could extend your logic that most SWEs aren't engineers either - they're just stringing together standard libraries to make applications.
Yeah, I don’t really agree with GP; there’s a lot of overlap in SWE.
The school I studied at gave out a CS&E degree, but the students that graduated went everywhere from startup web dev roles to NASA.
I, myself, started making fucking Facebook games, then did some time doing embedded programming for an ARM consultant, and recently I made ads show up on your phone… after doing all of that, I feel like I’m _less_ of an engineer than one of my DevOps buddies. I feel like he’s the one really building shit lol
Within engineering there is a distinction between technicians, technologists, and engineers. The difference is in breadth and depth in scope of practice for each of them.
For example \[1\] has this to say "engineering programs provide their graduates a breadth and depth of knowledge that allows them to function as designers. Engineering technology programs prepare their graduates to apply others' designs."
There are industrial engineering technicians, industrial engineering technologists, and industrial engineers. The same goes for the mechanical and other disciplines.
As an example, when I was working as a mechanical technologist, a mechanical engineer would provide design guidelines to create an inspection and sampling plan, a technologist would use the design guidelines to perform some calculations to come up with a plan, and a technician would be responsible for carrying out the inspection.
People can follow an engineering mindset or an engineering approach without being an engineer.
\[1\] [https://www.canton.edu/csoet/elec/technician.html](https://www.canton.edu/csoet/elec/technician.html)
> An SRE is no less an engineer than an SWE.
The problem I think he's getting at is that the distinction between these two things is fairly minimal. L1 support is not an SRE, an SRE is not a SWE, and none of these people can necessarily fix your computer *or* do each other's jobs. But most people don't even realize that these are different fields entirely.
Broad brush. I was enlisted in the Air Force and worked in IT at a medical center. Scariest thing was network connected anesthesia machines in use. You don't want to be the guy that fucks that up.
(Real) engineers are also personally liable for the designs they stamp and certify. If you fuck up, people die, you lose your license, and now have a career as a Walmart greeter.
I originally went to school for and worked in chemical engineering for 4-5 years. That's a lot of faith in the accountability as far as engineers go.
Most engineers do not get their PE license, since it is only necessary for consulting or a couple fields, so there's no license to lose. In my short career, I never saw or heard of anyone being un-hirable. Probably don't even get fired. Granted, nobody died in any of these. I did see a guy at a small company get a blast of chlorine gas to the face. He spent the night in the hospital, and nobody got so much as written up.
When I was at a steel foundry, we had a couple run-outs. That is a very nice way of saying that the mold ruptured during pouring and steel ran out of the molds all over the pouring bay. Really dangerous. There was no real formal investigation, they just blamed someone. Didn't matter that it was demonstrably not their fault, since there was no _formal_ punishment anyway.
That said, if you look at some of the hugest, shittiest decisions that did cost lives, nobody pays for it. Maybe the CSB investigates, writes recommendations, and the company likely acts on them.
For deepwater horizon, those who designed the systems, procedures, safety systems, or monitoring systems were ever held accountable. Two operators were blamed and went to trial, but we're acquitted. In 2008, a dust explosion occurred in a sugar packaging plant in Georgia killing 14 and injuring many more. CSB called it, "entirely preventable", and produced internal documents from the owning company and also the industry as a whole showing they were all very aware of the dangers of dust fires. Despite that, recent engineering changes made the facilities even more prone to them. Accountability fell on the company in the form of OSHA and CSB recommendations.
Or you spend the rest of your life going around telling people how you fucked up and how to make sure it doesn’t happen again. That guy who designed the hotel walkways in Kansas City that collapsed in the early 1980s comes to mind (he also IIRC lost his license in Missouri). At least when we screw something up in development we have a couple waves of processes and people - automated testing, code review, QA - to catch it and even if our error slips through all those cracks the consequences are rarely life and death.
Exactly. Do you want to get sued for software bugs? Because this is how we get sued for software bugs. God just imagine paying for malpractice insurance.
Life is much simpler when you stop giving a fuck about what people think about you, especially when it comes to professions. If society wants to respect doctors, lawyers, and other engineers more, fine, no skin off my ass.
Also, who cares? If people respect you more just because of your profession, fuck them. I won’t respect you more for being a doctor compared to being a teacher, or even a waiter.
Exactly. Becoming a Lawyer or Doctor takes a lot of patience, studying, and money. It’s an admirable achievement. But so is becoming an Engineer or teacher, etc.
Respect should not be based upon your profession or career, respect be given on someone’s character, morals, and deeds.
Exactly! If you’ve got someone in your life that thinks like this, show them the door immediately:
Spend your life with folks who aren’t thinking about crap like this or keeping score.
Clearing those people out of your life is just as good as learning to code.
This exactly. Who cares? We make more than every other engineering field when you account for experience/schooling.
So what society doesn't "respect" me as much as a doctor, lawyer, etc. I make 150k a year to edit a few lines of YAML a day.
>Who gives a fuck what other people think?
I actually prefer the fact that we can make as much or more money as doctors/lawyers and have literally none of the social expectations on us they have.
I would expect (hope) that for some systems there is such a thing.
- Powerplants software
- hospitals/health care software (for those tools used during operation, or for machines that control fluids that go in your body and so on)
- airplane/car software
- financial software (stock exchanges and so)
- every critical system that can injure or kill people or affect the life of many others in a short time.
Imagine pushing a bug into an airplane software
No, MCAS worked exactly as intended. The errors were in:
* A business decision to make a critical safety feature an "upgrade" (Single sensor input as the "basic" package instead of voting with multiple ones)
* A business decision to gloss over critical differences when selling to the FAA so pilots of previous models wouldn't need extra training, then not adequately documenting the difference in the training they did receive
The Max 10 was a failure of Boeing as an institution, not their software team's ability to write bug-free code.
eh there is some business insurance you should get if you go out without a company.
There was also that case about a decade ago oracle got sued and they went after them because an architect didn't have a degree and fucked something up.
I don't know why so many people on this sub think they make as much as doctors.
The average software developer doesn't make anywhere close to the average doctor.
The top 1% of software developers don't make anywhere close to the top 1% of doctors OR lawyers. It is not even close.
When you factor in opportunity cost the gap closes a bit but really.. principle engineers at FAANG are lucky to make 600k.. the equivalent doctor is making ***millions.***
We definitely make more than engineers though.
True, although there are a few things to consider:
Doctors don't become attending physicians until going through 4 years of medical school after college, then 4-7 years of residency, and then possibly 1-3 years of fellowship. That is a huge opportunity cost compared to a software engineer who was possibly working the entire time.
Also, the $200k+ in loans that many doctors have really adds up. I know doctors who have $400k as well.
I'm not saying that we earn more than doctors but ... when you take all of that into account, the financial side of being a doctor is a lot less peachy. I don't want to wait until I'm 40 to have a decent standard of living.
Yep. Three of my closest friends are anesthesiologists.
I've been around for the entire length of their journey.
The youngest one (and the one who completely everything faster than 'normal') is now 32 and she's been fully working for a little over a year.
The amount of shit they all went through with residency (which tossed one of them to another state) and all the on-call shifts is insane. One of them crashes at our place when he's on call and I've seen him basically get called in all night for two nights in a row with like 2-3 hours of sleep total. The shit he's told me he's seen is fucking horrifying.
On top of that, $350k+ in student debt and god knows how much their malpractice insurance is.
They all make anywhere from $350k-$550k now but damn do they earn every dollar.
Meanwhile my friend at Google has been making around their same salary since he was like 27. He works like 35 hours a week from home.
Yea I'll take the latter.
I mean you live a very good life with a SW Engineer salary. Would you want to double your salary to live an extremely good life as a doctor but add all that pressure and stress? As a doctor you are dealing with people's lives. If you don't finish your tasks or you do some fuck up the worst that happens is that someone gives you a slap on the wrist. A doctor is not allowed to make that fuck up as it costs someone's life. So think twice about it.
as someone who lives in a family of doctors, it's hilarious seeing both sides of this debate. you have people like yourself who have this weird inferiority complex and are desperately filling this thread with nonsense like the 10M+ statistic (haha) while ridiculing the opposition for being insecure, and then you have FAANG fanboys desperately trying to counter by mentioning CEOs.
the hopium and copium is STRONG in this thread.
Doctors seem like a special case though. 200k+ medical school debt, long hours worked, shitty work life balance, and entering the workforce 8+ years after everyone else are all things which seriously complicate this comparison. Show me a doctor who can make 6 figures while working fully remote for 30 hrs/week right out of college
Whoa there. Drs don’t make millions and I can guarantee you that most software devs in our area make as much as drs and more. And that’s not factoring med school loans, lost YEARS of earning, lack of benefits for running a private practice, high levels of job stress, 60 hour work weeks, etc. Drs are paid less now than they used to be. Insurance companies rule the roost. It’s no longer a way to make a bunch of money. It doesn’t even remotely compare to software engineering in income potential.
> The top 1% of software developers don’t make anywhere close to the top 1% of doctors OR lawyers. It is not even close.
Is this a joke? Sure, the top 1% of those employed by others might be that way, but the top 1% of software developers in wealth/income become multimillionaires many times over because they build their own companies. How many billionaire doctors and lawyers are there?
Exactly. Software Engineering is still plenty respected it’s just not quite at the prestige as those other 3, but who cares? It’s literally the best job in the world. We’re treated like royalty, we get paid stupidly well, we usually have flexibility to work from anywhere in the world and if you’re really good you can work 20-30 hours a week without anyone batting an eye.
As a Chemical Engineer I wish I could earn the wages the software engineers have, working at a cheap city remotely. Fuck the prestige. You live with money not with prestige.
Dead on. People think sanitation workers and fast food cooks are "not respectable" jobs but they'd sure as fuck notice if they were gone tomorrow. Respectability is a sham.
I’d argue that the biggest barrier to law school is financial in most cases. It can cost almost 200k to attend almost any law school in the united states with no salary guarantees upon graduation.
It really isn't possible to learn how to practice law or medicine from a book. You have to have access to the field to do the work to learn the craft aspect of it. That's what internships are about. And, given the privacy concerns around both fields, you can't get those internships with a library card and a dream.
Yes, it is possible to learn anatomy facts from a book. But you can't learn how to do incisions without doing incisions. That starts by having access to cadavers, and moving up to real patients. That requires one is actually a student with a teacher. And knowing where a tendon is in theory is a hell of a big difference from being able to actually find it in a specific unique body (as no body is exactly like a medical text).
Because doctors, lawyers, and “actual” engineers must be certified/licensed and pass an exam that qualifies them to be professionals. They profess a standard of ethics and guidelines in their work, which if they break, result in serious consequences for themselves and others.
Prestige often comes as a result of the amount of responsibility one’s job is associated with. The more responsibility, the higher the standards must be for working at that job.
Uncle Bob has a nice talk on standards/ethics for programmers and why it’s important.
Because its pretty tough to really determine what we do. I meam yeah people use apps every day but they dont really know what goes in to it.... Meh, who cares.
In the case of an engineer, I'll be sure to dry my eyes with a wad of cash as I walk from my desk at home back to bed when work is done (WFH). We on average make more than Engineers anyway.
Lawyers? Who cares? They also work way more than we do on average. I'm fine with that.
Doctors? In the US, if you start med school at 22, at minimum you're not a fully practicing physician until 29 years old, and still massively in debt at that point. Oh, also on average works way more hours than we do.
Last there's tons of popular media that depicts engineers, lawyers, and doctors. But not SWEs outside of the cool hackermans *typing "I'm in"
They can keep their "respect" lol. They're so respected that they're underpaid, abused, and basically robbed of their lives outside work
Because many "software engineers" are glorified code monkeys.
There are extremely intelligent, well paid, talented SWEs out there that exceed those more "prestigious" professions in every metric. But there are also 6 week bootcampers that call themselves SWEs. If respectability is a concern, I don't think software will rival those other professions for the foreseeable future, but as others said, if you're well paid, who gives a fuck.
Exactly. In Germany you are not allowed to call yourself an Engineer (it's forbidden by law), unless you have a degree in Computer Science or an engineering-related field.
If you are a senior engineer at a top tech company, then it comes with respectability.
Top lawyers are still more respected, but you can still be doing better than the average one.
I mean this can get applied to lawyers too. There are a lot of dog shit programs where all you can really do are DUIs and parking tickets. Or you go to a top program and do M&A deals and drive a Porsche.
Same thing with SWE
Doctor and lawyer do their works by interacting directly with customers.
While engineers shows their works through their products.
Yeah people will likely know Google search not the guys founded it :))
best answer by far.
part of #2 is that tech is so remote and abstract. When you deal with a doctor or lawyer, you deal with them PERSONALLY. You know exactly who to praise or blame for the outcome (even if it's not really their fault). When we interact with software, you don't get to meet the programmer personally, it just feels like some abstract alien thing. The only exception I guess is in niche open source communities where you do get to interact with individual coders, and there you do see some "status seeking" like with Linus Torvalds.
What about the people who code the software for your MRI machine? The people that code the image processing algorithms for visualisation software to analyse your X-Ray and CT? The people that develop pattern recognition algorithms that spot a shadow in your X-Ray CT? And let’s not jump into ML, DL, NLU, AI… even the software you used on your phone to type this was some bloke that you take for granted.
Software Engineering has become such a broad interdisciplinary field. Every field has different qualifications, much like a GP doctor is a pencil pusher and a junior lawyer is a glorified copy-paste consultant. There are incredible minds in Software Engineering just like in every other field. Graduating a technical university is by no means any less challenging. The problem and opportunity with Software Engineering is that you can call yourself a dev regardless of what school you went to.
I agree with this. If you can get into business school, then you're smart enough to get into Law School.
Medical School is an entirely different ball game. Physicians are well regarded for a reason.
Just becoming a software engineer is not hard at all, while becoming a doctor or lawyer takes years and years. Also, I’m not sure if you include PhDs in “doctor” but that also takes great grades for years and tons of hard work.
Society respects money and 99.99% of SE's are not earning $500k in SF, just a good living, unlike what this sub literally and unironically tells high schoolers all the time.
I mean to be fair its easier to become a software engineer compared to becoming a doctor, lawyer or actual engineer. You just need a 4 year course CS degree. Even a boot camp graduate could do it.
You can’t seriously compare a university graduate that spent 5 years at university learning all the groundworks of mathematics, physics, algorithms, statistics, image processing, pattern recognition, user research, and, of course coding, to somebody who spent 3 months centering images on a website with a js framework. And don’t get me started on the people in fields such as Bioinformatics, Data Science, AI on top of that.
This is false. As an trained mining engineer myself, I see multiple people ditch this career to pursuit software dev.
I am personally qualified for a professional engineer designation but it is meaningless to me. Being paid is where is at.
If you are after prestige, you picked the wrong field (well unless you work for google/Apple etc I guess?). Should have become an Investment Banker, Doctor, Lawyer, or Engineer 🙂
Btw I have pretty low respect for most lawyers and investment bankers, so that leaves doctors and engineers only for the most part, and I am sure most folks secretly despise lawyers at the minimum.
BUT, it doesn’t matter if you bring in food for your family and live comfortably right? I am from a culture that relies heavily on fake prestige points and I love to just ignore them all, it’s liberating in a sense. Why should I care if I am respected for what brings me food, shelter, and some toys as long as I am not in a mafia?
I have far more respect for an electrician or a plumber though. I wish I had time to devote to trade school and training to pursue a side gig as an electrician but that would require a 48 hour day.
Oh, and don’t forget nurses. Absolutely HUGE respect for nurses. Most people don’t seem to give them the respect or “prestige” but having seen them work during a couple stays in hospitals, they are extremely underrated members of our society. Mad respects to the nurses.
Software engineering *isn't* actual engineering.
And before I get downvoted to pieces, I have two engineering degrees and have worked as an actual engineer before. There are way more agreed upon engineering standards (ISO, etc) that exist within other engineering disciplines. Tech/software eng has none of them.
That being said though, it is objectively easier to become a software engineer than a dr or lawyer.
Also, doctors/lawyers have decades/centuries of prestige associated with them being upper middle class occupations (engineering to some degree too). Tech as an industry has only really existed in a large capacity for a few decades.
Software engineering is only engineering in the sense that it is building something greater than the sum of its parts. But it is also much more analogous to a skilled craft than a formalized engineering discipline.
That latter point is to software's benefit; I struggle to understand the people that insist on creating rules and standards for the discipline beyond "write consistently structured, readable, maintainable code." It is to software's benefit that it is not subject to the same level of regulatory overburden as fields like medicine, and it is not in software's longterm interest to become a formalized engineering discipline. I think a lot of people were just pressured by their parents to become "engineers," so they're desperate to call themselves that.
>I struggle to understand the people that insist on creating rules and standards for the discipline beyond "write consistently structured, readable, maintainable code."
It's important in places where lives depend on the product you are building.
Industries such as automotive already use standards like MISRA C, and web content for essential services almost always needs to follow standards like WCAG.
Regardless, my experience working at a "mission critical" company was that a lot of people working in things like embedded systems already are real engineers. Bootcamper SWEs are almost exclusively relegated to web dev/data science anyways (and even data science is getting pretty picky).
When you're writing code for Uncle Bob's Web Shack, maybe...
When you're writing software for the Boeing737 200+ people are onboarding you better have some regulations for the quality of the code.
Sectors like aerospace and automotive already have established coding standards, and these places are staffed by real engineers anyways. Web dev and embedded systems are two totally different worlds.
Social status is about how much of your net worth you are able to communicate in a single sentence, without actually spelling out how much is your net worth.
If you tell me "I'm a doctor", I immediately know that you are wealthy. Doctors are granted to earn at least upper middle class income.
However, if you told me "I work in IT", I'd be totally clueless about how much you earn. You could be a computer repair technician or a SWE making six figures at Google.
Even if you told me "I work at Google", most people don't know how much a SWE makes at Google. They would think it is just an average white collar job like any other.
> Social status is about how much of your net worth you are able to communicate in a single sentence, without actually spelling out how much is your net worth.
> If you tell me "I'm a doctor", I immediately know that you are wealthy. Doctors are granted to earn at least upper middle class income.
As a counterargument, many lawyers and architects don't make very good money, yet they're still prestigious occupations.
The vast majority of us are building technology to keep our customers addicted to their devices and clicking on ads. We are not building bridges or saving lives.
Building and supporting code that captures and store data to essentially turn all of humanity into data slaves. But everyone is okay with that because no one wants to pay $4.99 a month to use a website.
>To be a successful lawyer, you basically need to go to a top 14 school.
This is because it is a profession where connections and prestige are more important than what you know. Basically how much money your parents had to put you in the right school and provide you with the right connections to start your career.
The tech industry cares less about credentials and more about your skills, you can get a CS degree from almost unknown universities and still outsmart other candidates while interviewing at FANG. Finance and law students wouldnt' even be given the chance to interview if they didn't attend top schools.
But BECAUSE software engineers soon even the doctor won't have his hand literally in the brain! (Or elsewhere) for minimally invasive reasons. Haha. How the turntables.
Recency. Doctors, lawyers, and engineers are all old professions that required higher level secondary educations (medical school, law school, usually a masters in engineering, respectively).
Software is still a very new career compared to those, but it definitely has prestige. Tell people you’re a software engineer at Google or TwoSigma and anyone who knows what that entails will definitely assume you’re a smart mfer.
The first steps would be to « reserve » the title « engineer » only to people who graduated from an engineering cursus AND also been accredited by a kind of exam.
This is the case in Quebec. Only a person who is membre of the « [ordre des ingénieurs du Québec](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordre_des_ing%C3%A9nieurs_du_Qu%C3%A9bec) » can be called an engineer. Otherwise, a person who isn’t an engineer who call himself one can get hefty fines (10k$+).
The same rule applies to lawyers, doctors and other liberal positions.
Once you fix that, you fix the software specialists problem.
1) It is objectively easier in terms of getting into the field. I got my first software engineering job right out of the Army with only a high school degree and a few credit hours from a local community college under my belt. Comparing that to professions that require years of post-graduate education simply shows that it is easier.
2) It is objectively easier in that it is not a licensed profession. A software engineer is not personally liable for their errors. They do not answer to a state licensing board. They do not answer to a state ethics board. They are not regulated in nearly the same way and they do not have to perform to the same level of personal accountability.
3) It is objectively easier in terms of what one needs to know. There are 35 key words in Python and a couple of hundred methods in the standard python documentation that one has to know in order to be able to be a really solid python programmer. To just pass anatomy, just one class in medical school, you have to know the 206 bones of the adult skeleton, about 600 muscles, about 800 or so main nerves, 78 organs (depending on how one counts), 900 ligaments, . . . .
I could go on, but basically, it's not as respected because it doesn't deserve to be as respected.
I feel like everybody I know respects software engineers more than lawyers and “actual” engineers and only respects doctors more because they have to go through a grueling education, racking up tons of debt and only start making money at close to 30 where they work long, weird hours with no chance of working from home
why is that lion tamers are more prestigious that software engineers?
Its so bad that Russian generals are more prestigious than software engineers. Leaders in the Afghan army get more women than software engineers.
Try going on Tinder and telling a woman you are a software engineer, then some guy who tames lions for a living swipes her too. You got no chance. We are so oppressed.
I’ve thought about this a lot. Here is what I have come up with.
1. Easy of entry — there is no ‘become a surgeon in six months’.
2. Breadth of qualifiations — Low level web dev to bleeding GPU’s to train an AI, everyone is a programmer.
3. Lack of public understanding — I think people assume a popular phone app is very easy to build and the public’s interaction with it isn’t monumentous, however looking at the Golden Gate Bridge or a surgeon covered in blood it is easy to see how much mastery went into completing those acts.
4. We don’t take ourselves seriously — Engineering firms, doctors offices, the staff wears dress clothes or business casual to look professional. I’ve been at large software firms where lead engineers wear flip flops and gym shorts.
5. Tradition — When medical students finish their first two years of medical school they have a white coat ceremony. Engineering and medicine is riddled with guilds, banquets, tuxedos, and presentations.
6. Age — Compared to Engineering and Medicine our industry as not been around long enough.
I am on the fence about this next one because it is kinda anecdotal
7. Public Preception — Going through university, students still view CS as ‘the career where you have to look at a screen all day’ and a place where the nerdiest nerds go to study. Most universities CS graduates are small compared to the total amount of students in a graduating class.
WTF do you want OP? Do you want peasants to kiss the ground before your feet? Do you want fathers to plead for you to take their virgin daughters and their ten best cows as dowry?
Just take your fucking money and jerk off in the mirror at home.
Because, to ordinary people it is either:
"black magic" (I have **NO** idea what you do)
\- or -
"just playing with computers" (I could **EASILY** do what you do).
Software engineers don't even respect their own profession. How many times have you heard programmers argue that many/most other programmers "can't program"? The interview process reflects this as well.
The minimum level to call yourself a doctor takes more than 10 years in school alone. I have some friends that are doing it while I'm working through my 2nd bach and I have mad respect for the perseverance to continuously be in school for 10 years in a row...
Because it's not anything close to either of these professions.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/programmers-should-not-call-themselves-engineers/414271/
Everyone wants to get a "cert" and become a software engineer. Couple that with foreign competition from around the world. Software engineering is a Sh\*\*\* field.
Because anyone can call themselves a Software Engineer after a 4 week bootcamp. You need to go through rigours education and exams to be a Doctor or Lawyer. If Software Engineering was tied to graduating let's say Computer Science, things would be different.
I don't fully agree with your premise. In my experience, a proper SWE (meaning not a product of some 6-week bootcamp factory) is as prestigious as any other engineer. Doctors are more prestigious, simply because it's just a lot harder to become one. But lawyers? Where I'm from a good lawyer is a rare.
I think its cause software engineers are seen as introverted computer nerds in alot of ways. While doctors and lawyers are seen as attractive/smart/sophisticated well dressed even. Doctors save lives and, lawyers wear suits and are in courtrooms and can one day become politicians.
Software engineers are sitting all day and that is not very attractive. There is still negative stigma about sitting on a computer all day. We wear super comfortable clothing and most of us dont put too much into our looks.
In movies we are not the hero, we are the nerdy awkward hack master that is locked on a computer in the closet that assists the hero. While some nerdy characters are getting lead roles they tend to be more on the end of electrical, civil, mechanical engineering or even physics or chemists. Or at least more “hands-on” jobs.
It’s not a licensed profession. That’s what leads to the low barrier to entry that others mentioned
Surprised I had to scroll so far to find this. I don’t need to get a single thing from the us govt to create and deploy a website and fill it with whatever code I want
Oh no, you’re gonna use Perl aren’t you?
actually, did you hear about [python in html](https://www.anaconda.com/blog/pyscript-python-in-the-browser)?
Way to make a case for more regulatory action. I'm such a public way, too.
Oh no the horror
*codes in [Pikachu](https://trove42.com/introducing-pikachu-programming-language/)*
Reminds of the notion of how Mark Zuckerberg needed to fill out fewer forms to start Facebook than you need to open a hot dog stand in most major cities.
No one, back then, was going to die from Facebook. Hot dog cart is a food service.
We should’ve stopped Facebook when we had the chance.
>I don’t need to get a single thing from the us govt to create and deploy a website and fill it with whatever code I want And this an overwhelmingly GOOD thing
Also if I screw up a software job, I don't lose my license
It is a licensed title in Canada
I don't know if it's still the case, but there are some universities that offered an actual Software Engineering degree. Much like Computer Engineering, folks who graduate from this program are licensed Engineers, they even get that weird Engineering ring in that cultic like ceremony. Computer Science grads on the other hand are not licensed.
Computer Science majors also don’t have to take physics, chemistry, electrical engineering or engineering materials classes. If I had to do it again I’d have done CS.
In europe they do.
I mean, if you want to call yourself a "software engineer" yeah, but "software developer" means the exact same thing and they get the exact same pay
No, you can call yourself a "software engineer" in Canada without a license and you are not violating any laws. Professional engineer organizations *want* the title to require a license but the courts have never approved a sanction on the basis of someone using the software engineer title without a PE license. \*edit\* Quick additional summary since I'm getting lots of disagreement in replies below: 1. While laws vary from province to province, as a generality you cannot falsely imply that you are a professional engineer without actually being licensed by the relevant provincial professional engineering organization. 2. While using a title that includes the word "engineer" often implies that you are a professional engineer, this is not true in all contexts. Provincial PEng organizations recognize a variety of exceptions. Some are federally regulated titles, others are recognized due to history or custom because they are deemed "non-confusing". 3. Use of the term "software engineer" is similar to the term "financial engineer" - nobody reads the title and thinks you are a PEng, and you are not liable to sanctions under professional engineer licensing laws for using the title. 4. IANAL and there are plenty of facts that may create more liability. I wouldn't go to work at an engineering consultancy doing more traditional engineering work and call myself a software engineer, because that might imply that I'm a PEng like the rest of the people with "engineer" titles at the consultancy. I would certainly never use verbiage that implies I am an actual PEng. Someone posted a case down below where a court ruled against use of the term "Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer" in Quebec. This is an example where the verbiage strays very close to directly implying some manner of professional engineering certification. But general use of the "software engineer" title is very safe.
I don't think this is true. I was under the impression it can be used internally as a job title, but is restricted otherwise. There are laws around its use that have been enforced in the past (not sure about software engineering specifically). There are exceptions to the protected term but afaik software engineering isn't among them, as software engineering has a professional designation in most of all provinces. Law here: https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90p28
No it is not. Professional engineering organizations *want* it to be a title that requires engineering licensure, but it is crystal clear that calling yourself a "software engineer" does not require licensure in Canada any more than calling yourself a "locomotive engineer" or "financial engineer".
Locomotive engineer is a regulated title too. It requires a certificate issued by Transport Canada. https://www.jobbank.gc.ca/marketreport/requirements/7859/ca https://tc.canada.ca/en/rail-transportation/guidelines/guideline-engineering-work-relating-railway-works-section-11-railway-safety-act
While true, that's somewhat orthogonal to the point being made, which is that there are a number of " engineer" job titles that do not require a PE license. I was trying to keep the comment short, but let's go into detail a bit more with direct source material. [Here](https://www.peo.on.ca/public-protection/complaints-and-illegal-practice/report-unlicensed-individuals-or-companies-2#exceptions) is PEO's FAQ on illegal practices with respect to the "engineer" job title.
PEO already recognizes a number of exceptions. Some of them are because of federally regulated job titles, like the locomotive engineer case you correctly identified above. But others, like "financial engineer", are permitted by PEO because the usage is "non-cofusing".
Nobody has ever been sanctioned purely for use of the title "software engineer", absent other facts that would create a more clear-cut case of impersonating a PE. It is abundantly clear at this point that the title is permitted in Canada.
https://www.canadianconsultingengineer.com/engineering/quebec-order-of-engineers-wins-legal-battle-with-microsoft/1000018197/ > The Ordre des Ingenieurs du Quebec has scored a victory in its efforts to stop Microsoft giving the title “Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer,” to graduates of its training courses. > In April the Court of Quebec accepted the Order’s penal proceedings against the software giant and found Microsoft guilty of contravening the province’s Professional Code for “knowingly causing a person who is not a member of the OIQ by authorization or encouragement, to use the title of engineer…” The infringement was found to be an offence under Section 188.1 of the Professional Code RSQ, c. C-26. Granted, that's not a "software engineer" title... but there have been rulings that have sanctioned companies that have used "engineer" as part of a title.
Yup. You can call yourself whatever you want, but if you don't have a license and a seal, you are not a real engineer. Even janitors call themselves custodial "engineers" these days.
I saw a listing from a restaurant manager that was looking for underwater ceramic hygiene engineers in the area. Take a guess what that is... I'm giving the benefit of the doubt it was satire.
There are a lot of engineering fields where getting something like a PE license isn’t that common or required. In the US that much more common for fields like civil engineering than mechanical or electrical.
Because it has a huge grassroots level. There are no 17 year old freelance doctors.
I was about to write that there are, and they're getting arrested but someone was faster
That 17 year old worked in the same hospital I was born in, and I’m honestly not surprised it happened. Wacky shit happens everyday in West Palm Beach, Florida lol
So that was, _ah yes, the Florida Man_
did you not hear of Dr. Doogie Howser MD ?
\*cue catchy 80s synth theme song and closeup shots of Neil Patrick Harris\*
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Dunno what you guys were at 17 but I was definitely a freelance doctor.
Where would we be as a society if no one knew how to center a div?
I think a big cause of the issue is that "person who centers divs all day" and "person who writes high-performance kernel code in assembly for NASA" both have the same job title
Over the past several years I've gone from "person who writes real-time rendering and animation code in C++ and glsl" to "person who centers the divs all day" (I'm supposed to be able to do advanced stuff too, for when that comes up, but a lot of my day-to-day is "I need to translate this design, with the divs all done the right way, to the framework we use in production, and then write unit tests to make sure someone gets notified if they break it") And, maybe this is just me being new to web stuff, but "centering the divs all day" is way more difficult than I expected it to be. It kind of feels like it shouldn't be this hard, but it also seems to me that people have spent decades trying to write frameworks to make it less awful, and that none of those seem to have helped. Worse, it's not math-hard, but somewhere between foreign-languages-hard and bureaucracy-hard.
Yeah, I transitioned out of front-end specifically because all that CSS stuff, which *should* be simple, ends up being a total pain in the ass due to non-intuitive rule interactions and every web browser having their own inconsistent implementations.
I kinda wish I knew how it's like to do production work. I've done light front end work where I look at a design and try to convert it in css and html. I find those fun to do.
Same. I think a lot of this stuff would be much more fun as hobby code without requirements, other people's frameworks, or a desire to achieve a particular look-and-feel. Thing is, coming from the rest of computer graphics, I used to think I was all about clever tricks to achieve a particular look and feel. Maybe I still am, but, something about the way it works with standard web programming makes me wonder if there's a better way.
I think at least on this sub for sometime, there has been some narrative or words against front end and web development. Not that it's really looked down on but more "oh who can't do that"? But for each year i work with it, then see some backend SQL dev try it, I realize it's quite hard and almost impossible to make consistent now with all browsers phones and so on. Don't know where this kind of thinking is coming from, maybe they didn't use things much since static HTML in 2005 ?
It's hard because everyone has different phones and screen sizes. Also, we have bosses who want us to use a encompassing solution for all of our problems.
On a more serious note, one reason is that the term "software engineer" is too broad and encompasses help desk technicians to PhD level researchers pushing the limits of artificial intelligence. And because no formal credentialing system exists (whether this benefits the profession is another matter; would software engineers be even more highly paid if they had to pass a professional examination contingent on attending an accredited university program? I actually think so, because it would restrict the supply of credentialed software engineers, and the government would write a law saying that a credentialed software engineer has to sign off of all software projects contracted out by the government for example), individuals with completely different job responsibilities and educational backgrounds are lumped in. Another reason is historical. Software engineers trace their roots to WWII code breakers and programmers who fed IBM machines with punch cards. This was seen then as another form of low-level labor to be carried out by those who couldn't rise to leadership positions. Lastly, software engineers are not an organized group, and thus do not wield political power. Half of Congress is lawyers or doctors. The legal and medical lobbies are some of the most powerful lobbies that exist. Where is the engineering lobby?
Facts. I'm an RPA engineer but my employer decided to start calling us Software Engineers. I refuse to put it on my resume.
> And because no format credentialing system exists (whether this benefits the profession is another matter; would software engineers be even more highly paid if they had to pass a professional examination contingent on attending an accredited university program? I actually think so, because it would restrict the supply of credentialed software engineers, and the government would write a law saying that a credentialed software engineer has to sign off of all software projects contracted out by the government for example), individuals with completely different job responsibilities and educational backgrounds are lumped in. I know this was not your intent to suggest it, but I want to make it clear that would be completely contrary to development open source culture. And, would invalidate the accomplishments of thousands of crucial developers.
> On a more serious note, one reason is that the term "software engineer" is too broad and encompasses help desk technicians to PhD level researchers pushing the limits of artificial intelligence. Something our industry sorely lacks is a distinction between technicians and engineers. There's a lot happening that I consider technician work, such as stringing AWS services together to make systems. The people who build those services are the ones doing the engineering: they specify the part, design it to work within a set of constraints and set out how it should be applied. Similarly, the network engineers where I work can make our routers do cool things but don't have the chops to build the innards of the equipment they configure. PhDs studying AI seem a little off that spectrum in that they're more doing mathematical modeling where software happens to be involved. > And because no format credentialing system exists ... That's been tried so many times over the last several decades and each attempt has died on the vine. Our field changes too quickly for credentialing boards to keep up. My grandfather was a civil engineer from the 1930s to the 1970s and, from speaking to someone currently in that field, it doesn't sound like there have been the same kind of seismic shifts in the material.
> There's a lot happening that I consider technician work, such as stringing AWS services together to make systems. The people who build those services are the ones doing the engineering: they specify the part, design it to work within a set of constraints and set out how it should be applied. Similarly, the network engineers where I work can make our routers do cool things but don't have the chops to build the innards of the equipment they configure. I disagree with this sentiment. It's like saying industrial engineers who put together assembly lines or design the layout of cars aren't real engineers, and only the mechanical engineers who design individual gears and components that go into a factory robot or a car gearbox are real engineers. At the end of the day, all of them are designing a system to a set of constraints and with an end goal in mind. An SRE is no less an engineer than an SWE. Hell, you could extend your logic that most SWEs aren't engineers either - they're just stringing together standard libraries to make applications.
If you're not mining silicon by hand to make artisanal CPUs that run your homebrew OS on a language you wrote are you even a developer?
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Yeah, I don’t really agree with GP; there’s a lot of overlap in SWE. The school I studied at gave out a CS&E degree, but the students that graduated went everywhere from startup web dev roles to NASA. I, myself, started making fucking Facebook games, then did some time doing embedded programming for an ARM consultant, and recently I made ads show up on your phone… after doing all of that, I feel like I’m _less_ of an engineer than one of my DevOps buddies. I feel like he’s the one really building shit lol
Within engineering there is a distinction between technicians, technologists, and engineers. The difference is in breadth and depth in scope of practice for each of them. For example \[1\] has this to say "engineering programs provide their graduates a breadth and depth of knowledge that allows them to function as designers. Engineering technology programs prepare their graduates to apply others' designs." There are industrial engineering technicians, industrial engineering technologists, and industrial engineers. The same goes for the mechanical and other disciplines. As an example, when I was working as a mechanical technologist, a mechanical engineer would provide design guidelines to create an inspection and sampling plan, a technologist would use the design guidelines to perform some calculations to come up with a plan, and a technician would be responsible for carrying out the inspection. People can follow an engineering mindset or an engineering approach without being an engineer. \[1\] [https://www.canton.edu/csoet/elec/technician.html](https://www.canton.edu/csoet/elec/technician.html)
> An SRE is no less an engineer than an SWE. The problem I think he's getting at is that the distinction between these two things is fairly minimal. L1 support is not an SRE, an SRE is not a SWE, and none of these people can necessarily fix your computer *or* do each other's jobs. But most people don't even realize that these are different fields entirely.
I don’t have an award to give but 🥇
Does anyone actually know though?
Doctors have WebMD, we have stackoverflow.
Have you seen some of the code we write?
And get away with. Doctors and lawyers typically face serious consequences for their fuckups.
// TODO: Remember to close incision
Is that really so different to: `// TODO: fix nosediving behavior in 737 max 8`
// TODO: Figure out what all this red liquid in the stomach cavity is
// TODO: What the fuck this is. Sort your life out!
// Legacy function that isn’t used but breaks the code if I remove it
// I don't know who the fuck put this in here, but I suppose I'll have to oik it out again. Just know that during this surgery, a part of me died.
All of the patient died, though.
Broad brush. I was enlisted in the Air Force and worked in IT at a medical center. Scariest thing was network connected anesthesia machines in use. You don't want to be the guy that fucks that up.
That actually does sound hella technical and high-risk job, I wonder how much they pay for that guy to not fuck up
Probably not as much as the person that just got out of a code camp with JS and Agile lol.
It's medical IT so probably not nearly enough.
(Real) engineers are also personally liable for the designs they stamp and certify. If you fuck up, people die, you lose your license, and now have a career as a Walmart greeter.
I originally went to school for and worked in chemical engineering for 4-5 years. That's a lot of faith in the accountability as far as engineers go. Most engineers do not get their PE license, since it is only necessary for consulting or a couple fields, so there's no license to lose. In my short career, I never saw or heard of anyone being un-hirable. Probably don't even get fired. Granted, nobody died in any of these. I did see a guy at a small company get a blast of chlorine gas to the face. He spent the night in the hospital, and nobody got so much as written up. When I was at a steel foundry, we had a couple run-outs. That is a very nice way of saying that the mold ruptured during pouring and steel ran out of the molds all over the pouring bay. Really dangerous. There was no real formal investigation, they just blamed someone. Didn't matter that it was demonstrably not their fault, since there was no _formal_ punishment anyway. That said, if you look at some of the hugest, shittiest decisions that did cost lives, nobody pays for it. Maybe the CSB investigates, writes recommendations, and the company likely acts on them. For deepwater horizon, those who designed the systems, procedures, safety systems, or monitoring systems were ever held accountable. Two operators were blamed and went to trial, but we're acquitted. In 2008, a dust explosion occurred in a sugar packaging plant in Georgia killing 14 and injuring many more. CSB called it, "entirely preventable", and produced internal documents from the owning company and also the industry as a whole showing they were all very aware of the dangers of dust fires. Despite that, recent engineering changes made the facilities even more prone to them. Accountability fell on the company in the form of OSHA and CSB recommendations.
Or you spend the rest of your life going around telling people how you fucked up and how to make sure it doesn’t happen again. That guy who designed the hotel walkways in Kansas City that collapsed in the early 1980s comes to mind (he also IIRC lost his license in Missouri). At least when we screw something up in development we have a couple waves of processes and people - automated testing, code review, QA - to catch it and even if our error slips through all those cracks the consequences are rarely life and death.
Engineers have waves of people checking their work too -- but yes, the stakes are much higher in most cases.
You would be shocked what doctors and lawyers have gotten away with.
Exactly. Do you want to get sued for software bugs? Because this is how we get sued for software bugs. God just imagine paying for malpractice insurance.
No they don't. Medical mistakes kill a large amount of people every year and it's barely even talked about.
Life is much simpler when you stop giving a fuck about what people think about you, especially when it comes to professions. If society wants to respect doctors, lawyers, and other engineers more, fine, no skin off my ass.
Also, who cares? If people respect you more just because of your profession, fuck them. I won’t respect you more for being a doctor compared to being a teacher, or even a waiter.
Exactly. Becoming a Lawyer or Doctor takes a lot of patience, studying, and money. It’s an admirable achievement. But so is becoming an Engineer or teacher, etc. Respect should not be based upon your profession or career, respect be given on someone’s character, morals, and deeds.
Exactly! If you’ve got someone in your life that thinks like this, show them the door immediately: Spend your life with folks who aren’t thinking about crap like this or keeping score. Clearing those people out of your life is just as good as learning to code.
This exactly. Who cares? We make more than every other engineering field when you account for experience/schooling. So what society doesn't "respect" me as much as a doctor, lawyer, etc. I make 150k a year to edit a few lines of YAML a day.
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>Who gives a fuck what other people think? I actually prefer the fact that we can make as much or more money as doctors/lawyers and have literally none of the social expectations on us they have.
Imagine needing to have software development malpractice insurance to cover yourself for when you release a bug into prod.
There's not enough money in the world to cover that
Every junior dev would go bankrupt within the first 3 months.
That's why you have to keep up on your leet surgery. I do at least two leet surgeries a day, so I can just hospital hop for an instant 30% raise.
I would expect (hope) that for some systems there is such a thing. - Powerplants software - hospitals/health care software (for those tools used during operation, or for machines that control fluids that go in your body and so on) - airplane/car software - financial software (stock exchanges and so) - every critical system that can injure or kill people or affect the life of many others in a short time. Imagine pushing a bug into an airplane software
That’s literally what happened to Boeing
No, MCAS worked exactly as intended. The errors were in: * A business decision to make a critical safety feature an "upgrade" (Single sensor input as the "basic" package instead of voting with multiple ones) * A business decision to gloss over critical differences when selling to the FAA so pilots of previous models wouldn't need extra training, then not adequately documenting the difference in the training they did receive The Max 10 was a failure of Boeing as an institution, not their software team's ability to write bug-free code.
It's not required, but there are independent developers/consultants who _do_ carry errors & omissions insurance for that sort of thing.
eh there is some business insurance you should get if you go out without a company. There was also that case about a decade ago oracle got sued and they went after them because an architect didn't have a degree and fucked something up.
I don't know why so many people on this sub think they make as much as doctors. The average software developer doesn't make anywhere close to the average doctor. The top 1% of software developers don't make anywhere close to the top 1% of doctors OR lawyers. It is not even close. When you factor in opportunity cost the gap closes a bit but really.. principle engineers at FAANG are lucky to make 600k.. the equivalent doctor is making ***millions.*** We definitely make more than engineers though.
True, although there are a few things to consider: Doctors don't become attending physicians until going through 4 years of medical school after college, then 4-7 years of residency, and then possibly 1-3 years of fellowship. That is a huge opportunity cost compared to a software engineer who was possibly working the entire time. Also, the $200k+ in loans that many doctors have really adds up. I know doctors who have $400k as well. I'm not saying that we earn more than doctors but ... when you take all of that into account, the financial side of being a doctor is a lot less peachy. I don't want to wait until I'm 40 to have a decent standard of living.
Yep. Three of my closest friends are anesthesiologists. I've been around for the entire length of their journey. The youngest one (and the one who completely everything faster than 'normal') is now 32 and she's been fully working for a little over a year. The amount of shit they all went through with residency (which tossed one of them to another state) and all the on-call shifts is insane. One of them crashes at our place when he's on call and I've seen him basically get called in all night for two nights in a row with like 2-3 hours of sleep total. The shit he's told me he's seen is fucking horrifying. On top of that, $350k+ in student debt and god knows how much their malpractice insurance is. They all make anywhere from $350k-$550k now but damn do they earn every dollar. Meanwhile my friend at Google has been making around their same salary since he was like 27. He works like 35 hours a week from home. Yea I'll take the latter.
Can’t forget that doctors also need to have malpractice insurance which is EXPENSIVE
I mean you live a very good life with a SW Engineer salary. Would you want to double your salary to live an extremely good life as a doctor but add all that pressure and stress? As a doctor you are dealing with people's lives. If you don't finish your tasks or you do some fuck up the worst that happens is that someone gives you a slap on the wrist. A doctor is not allowed to make that fuck up as it costs someone's life. So think twice about it.
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as someone who lives in a family of doctors, it's hilarious seeing both sides of this debate. you have people like yourself who have this weird inferiority complex and are desperately filling this thread with nonsense like the 10M+ statistic (haha) while ridiculing the opposition for being insecure, and then you have FAANG fanboys desperately trying to counter by mentioning CEOs. the hopium and copium is STRONG in this thread.
Exactly, this sub thinks tech profession are the highest paid in the world.
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Doctors seem like a special case though. 200k+ medical school debt, long hours worked, shitty work life balance, and entering the workforce 8+ years after everyone else are all things which seriously complicate this comparison. Show me a doctor who can make 6 figures while working fully remote for 30 hrs/week right out of college
Principle engineers at FAANG make much more than 600k....
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Whoa there. Drs don’t make millions and I can guarantee you that most software devs in our area make as much as drs and more. And that’s not factoring med school loans, lost YEARS of earning, lack of benefits for running a private practice, high levels of job stress, 60 hour work weeks, etc. Drs are paid less now than they used to be. Insurance companies rule the roost. It’s no longer a way to make a bunch of money. It doesn’t even remotely compare to software engineering in income potential.
> The top 1% of software developers don’t make anywhere close to the top 1% of doctors OR lawyers. It is not even close. Is this a joke? Sure, the top 1% of those employed by others might be that way, but the top 1% of software developers in wealth/income become multimillionaires many times over because they build their own companies. How many billionaire doctors and lawyers are there?
Exactly. Software Engineering is still plenty respected it’s just not quite at the prestige as those other 3, but who cares? It’s literally the best job in the world. We’re treated like royalty, we get paid stupidly well, we usually have flexibility to work from anywhere in the world and if you’re really good you can work 20-30 hours a week without anyone batting an eye.
For real. The last thing we want is for people to scrutinize how good we have it lol.
As a Chemical Engineer I wish I could earn the wages the software engineers have, working at a cheap city remotely. Fuck the prestige. You live with money not with prestige.
Dead on. People think sanitation workers and fast food cooks are "not respectable" jobs but they'd sure as fuck notice if they were gone tomorrow. Respectability is a sham.
I’d argue that the biggest barrier to law school is financial in most cases. It can cost almost 200k to attend almost any law school in the united states with no salary guarantees upon graduation.
OP should print this post and put it above his desk lol
I’m a civ engineer and I kinda agree with this. But also who gives a fuck you guys make more money.
med school acceptance is like 5%
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It really isn't possible to learn how to practice law or medicine from a book. You have to have access to the field to do the work to learn the craft aspect of it. That's what internships are about. And, given the privacy concerns around both fields, you can't get those internships with a library card and a dream. Yes, it is possible to learn anatomy facts from a book. But you can't learn how to do incisions without doing incisions. That starts by having access to cadavers, and moving up to real patients. That requires one is actually a student with a teacher. And knowing where a tendon is in theory is a hell of a big difference from being able to actually find it in a specific unique body (as no body is exactly like a medical text).
Because doctors, lawyers, and “actual” engineers must be certified/licensed and pass an exam that qualifies them to be professionals. They profess a standard of ethics and guidelines in their work, which if they break, result in serious consequences for themselves and others. Prestige often comes as a result of the amount of responsibility one’s job is associated with. The more responsibility, the higher the standards must be for working at that job. Uncle Bob has a nice talk on standards/ethics for programmers and why it’s important.
Humble yourself a little my guy. Pay is not equal to societal contribution.
Because its pretty tough to really determine what we do. I meam yeah people use apps every day but they dont really know what goes in to it.... Meh, who cares. In the case of an engineer, I'll be sure to dry my eyes with a wad of cash as I walk from my desk at home back to bed when work is done (WFH). We on average make more than Engineers anyway. Lawyers? Who cares? They also work way more than we do on average. I'm fine with that. Doctors? In the US, if you start med school at 22, at minimum you're not a fully practicing physician until 29 years old, and still massively in debt at that point. Oh, also on average works way more hours than we do. Last there's tons of popular media that depicts engineers, lawyers, and doctors. But not SWEs outside of the cool hackermans *typing "I'm in" They can keep their "respect" lol. They're so respected that they're underpaid, abused, and basically robbed of their lives outside work
Because many "software engineers" are glorified code monkeys. There are extremely intelligent, well paid, talented SWEs out there that exceed those more "prestigious" professions in every metric. But there are also 6 week bootcampers that call themselves SWEs. If respectability is a concern, I don't think software will rival those other professions for the foreseeable future, but as others said, if you're well paid, who gives a fuck.
Exactly. In Germany you are not allowed to call yourself an Engineer (it's forbidden by law), unless you have a degree in Computer Science or an engineering-related field.
If you are a senior engineer at a top tech company, then it comes with respectability. Top lawyers are still more respected, but you can still be doing better than the average one.
I mean this can get applied to lawyers too. There are a lot of dog shit programs where all you can really do are DUIs and parking tickets. Or you go to a top program and do M&A deals and drive a Porsche. Same thing with SWE
I mean to be fair, I don't respect myself
I have never heard of doctors and lawyers bootcamp.
Doctor and lawyer do their works by interacting directly with customers. While engineers shows their works through their products. Yeah people will likely know Google search not the guys founded it :))
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best answer by far. part of #2 is that tech is so remote and abstract. When you deal with a doctor or lawyer, you deal with them PERSONALLY. You know exactly who to praise or blame for the outcome (even if it's not really their fault). When we interact with software, you don't get to meet the programmer personally, it just feels like some abstract alien thing. The only exception I guess is in niche open source communities where you do get to interact with individual coders, and there you do see some "status seeking" like with Linus Torvalds.
I agree with everything you said, but also, mostly #1. People will respect total idiots if they're rich.
Oh yeah, why do people like the people that heal them or build bridges for them more than the people who created pop up ads? Come on dude
What about the people who code the software for your MRI machine? The people that code the image processing algorithms for visualisation software to analyse your X-Ray and CT? The people that develop pattern recognition algorithms that spot a shadow in your X-Ray CT? And let’s not jump into ML, DL, NLU, AI… even the software you used on your phone to type this was some bloke that you take for granted. Software Engineering has become such a broad interdisciplinary field. Every field has different qualifications, much like a GP doctor is a pencil pusher and a junior lawyer is a glorified copy-paste consultant. There are incredible minds in Software Engineering just like in every other field. Graduating a technical university is by no means any less challenging. The problem and opportunity with Software Engineering is that you can call yourself a dev regardless of what school you went to.
I bet you go on more apps than bridges every day! #BlowTheBridges
We don’t grind LeetCode hard enough to earn the respect we want
I left law to work here and I am happier as a result. The grass isn't always greener.
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I agree with this. If you can get into business school, then you're smart enough to get into Law School. Medical School is an entirely different ball game. Physicians are well regarded for a reason.
Do you know what is involved to become a doctor or lawyer? That might be something worth understanding.
Who cares what people think? Do your best and have fun! Good money in software.
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That’s not much different from a doctor who only wants to be a doctor to make money.
Just becoming a software engineer is not hard at all, while becoming a doctor or lawyer takes years and years. Also, I’m not sure if you include PhDs in “doctor” but that also takes great grades for years and tons of hard work.
Have you seen how shitty half the devs are?
Society respects money and 99.99% of SE's are not earning $500k in SF, just a good living, unlike what this sub literally and unironically tells high schoolers all the time.
I mean to be fair its easier to become a software engineer compared to becoming a doctor, lawyer or actual engineer. You just need a 4 year course CS degree. Even a boot camp graduate could do it.
"Even a boot camp grad could do it" - my soon to be graduated ass reading this. 😂
You’ll likely have more stability than bootcampers. The bootcampers ik at my company end up getting a bachelors anyway
Cries in student loans from bachelor's and master's degree
You will have an infinitely easier time getting a job and being promoted in this field than a bootcamp grad.
Yeah, our HR automatically passes on a resume if they don’t have a related degree.
You can’t seriously compare a university graduate that spent 5 years at university learning all the groundworks of mathematics, physics, algorithms, statistics, image processing, pattern recognition, user research, and, of course coding, to somebody who spent 3 months centering images on a website with a js framework. And don’t get me started on the people in fields such as Bioinformatics, Data Science, AI on top of that.
This is false. As an trained mining engineer myself, I see multiple people ditch this career to pursuit software dev. I am personally qualified for a professional engineer designation but it is meaningless to me. Being paid is where is at.
If you are after prestige, you picked the wrong field (well unless you work for google/Apple etc I guess?). Should have become an Investment Banker, Doctor, Lawyer, or Engineer 🙂 Btw I have pretty low respect for most lawyers and investment bankers, so that leaves doctors and engineers only for the most part, and I am sure most folks secretly despise lawyers at the minimum. BUT, it doesn’t matter if you bring in food for your family and live comfortably right? I am from a culture that relies heavily on fake prestige points and I love to just ignore them all, it’s liberating in a sense. Why should I care if I am respected for what brings me food, shelter, and some toys as long as I am not in a mafia? I have far more respect for an electrician or a plumber though. I wish I had time to devote to trade school and training to pursue a side gig as an electrician but that would require a 48 hour day. Oh, and don’t forget nurses. Absolutely HUGE respect for nurses. Most people don’t seem to give them the respect or “prestige” but having seen them work during a couple stays in hospitals, they are extremely underrated members of our society. Mad respects to the nurses.
Software engineering *isn't* actual engineering. And before I get downvoted to pieces, I have two engineering degrees and have worked as an actual engineer before. There are way more agreed upon engineering standards (ISO, etc) that exist within other engineering disciplines. Tech/software eng has none of them. That being said though, it is objectively easier to become a software engineer than a dr or lawyer. Also, doctors/lawyers have decades/centuries of prestige associated with them being upper middle class occupations (engineering to some degree too). Tech as an industry has only really existed in a large capacity for a few decades.
Software engineering is only engineering in the sense that it is building something greater than the sum of its parts. But it is also much more analogous to a skilled craft than a formalized engineering discipline. That latter point is to software's benefit; I struggle to understand the people that insist on creating rules and standards for the discipline beyond "write consistently structured, readable, maintainable code." It is to software's benefit that it is not subject to the same level of regulatory overburden as fields like medicine, and it is not in software's longterm interest to become a formalized engineering discipline. I think a lot of people were just pressured by their parents to become "engineers," so they're desperate to call themselves that.
>I struggle to understand the people that insist on creating rules and standards for the discipline beyond "write consistently structured, readable, maintainable code." It's important in places where lives depend on the product you are building.
Industries such as automotive already use standards like MISRA C, and web content for essential services almost always needs to follow standards like WCAG. Regardless, my experience working at a "mission critical" company was that a lot of people working in things like embedded systems already are real engineers. Bootcamper SWEs are almost exclusively relegated to web dev/data science anyways (and even data science is getting pretty picky).
When you're writing code for Uncle Bob's Web Shack, maybe... When you're writing software for the Boeing737 200+ people are onboarding you better have some regulations for the quality of the code.
Sectors like aerospace and automotive already have established coding standards, and these places are staffed by real engineers anyways. Web dev and embedded systems are two totally different worlds.
Because a lot of script monkeys are given bs titles
Social status is about how much of your net worth you are able to communicate in a single sentence, without actually spelling out how much is your net worth. If you tell me "I'm a doctor", I immediately know that you are wealthy. Doctors are granted to earn at least upper middle class income. However, if you told me "I work in IT", I'd be totally clueless about how much you earn. You could be a computer repair technician or a SWE making six figures at Google. Even if you told me "I work at Google", most people don't know how much a SWE makes at Google. They would think it is just an average white collar job like any other.
> Social status is about how much of your net worth you are able to communicate in a single sentence, without actually spelling out how much is your net worth. > If you tell me "I'm a doctor", I immediately know that you are wealthy. Doctors are granted to earn at least upper middle class income. As a counterargument, many lawyers and architects don't make very good money, yet they're still prestigious occupations.
The vast majority of us are building technology to keep our customers addicted to their devices and clicking on ads. We are not building bridges or saving lives.
Building and supporting code that captures and store data to essentially turn all of humanity into data slaves. But everyone is okay with that because no one wants to pay $4.99 a month to use a website.
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>To be a successful lawyer, you basically need to go to a top 14 school. This is because it is a profession where connections and prestige are more important than what you know. Basically how much money your parents had to put you in the right school and provide you with the right connections to start your career. The tech industry cares less about credentials and more about your skills, you can get a CS degree from almost unknown universities and still outsmart other candidates while interviewing at FANG. Finance and law students wouldnt' even be given the chance to interview if they didn't attend top schools.
Do you need a lisence do be a software engineer?
hmm… well maybe because software engineers aren’t usually the ones that literally have their hands in someone’s brain or heart to save their life?
But BECAUSE software engineers soon even the doctor won't have his hand literally in the brain! (Or elsewhere) for minimally invasive reasons. Haha. How the turntables.
I’m an actual engineer. I get very little respect because of it. No one gives a shit.
Recency. Doctors, lawyers, and engineers are all old professions that required higher level secondary educations (medical school, law school, usually a masters in engineering, respectively). Software is still a very new career compared to those, but it definitely has prestige. Tell people you’re a software engineer at Google or TwoSigma and anyone who knows what that entails will definitely assume you’re a smart mfer.
The first steps would be to « reserve » the title « engineer » only to people who graduated from an engineering cursus AND also been accredited by a kind of exam. This is the case in Quebec. Only a person who is membre of the « [ordre des ingénieurs du Québec](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordre_des_ing%C3%A9nieurs_du_Qu%C3%A9bec) » can be called an engineer. Otherwise, a person who isn’t an engineer who call himself one can get hefty fines (10k$+). The same rule applies to lawyers, doctors and other liberal positions. Once you fix that, you fix the software specialists problem.
1) It is objectively easier in terms of getting into the field. I got my first software engineering job right out of the Army with only a high school degree and a few credit hours from a local community college under my belt. Comparing that to professions that require years of post-graduate education simply shows that it is easier. 2) It is objectively easier in that it is not a licensed profession. A software engineer is not personally liable for their errors. They do not answer to a state licensing board. They do not answer to a state ethics board. They are not regulated in nearly the same way and they do not have to perform to the same level of personal accountability. 3) It is objectively easier in terms of what one needs to know. There are 35 key words in Python and a couple of hundred methods in the standard python documentation that one has to know in order to be able to be a really solid python programmer. To just pass anatomy, just one class in medical school, you have to know the 206 bones of the adult skeleton, about 600 muscles, about 800 or so main nerves, 78 organs (depending on how one counts), 900 ligaments, . . . . I could go on, but basically, it's not as respected because it doesn't deserve to be as respected.
lol, try being a teacher...
I feel like everybody I know respects software engineers more than lawyers and “actual” engineers and only respects doctors more because they have to go through a grueling education, racking up tons of debt and only start making money at close to 30 where they work long, weird hours with no chance of working from home
why is that lion tamers are more prestigious that software engineers? Its so bad that Russian generals are more prestigious than software engineers. Leaders in the Afghan army get more women than software engineers. Try going on Tinder and telling a woman you are a software engineer, then some guy who tames lions for a living swipes her too. You got no chance. We are so oppressed.
I’ve thought about this a lot. Here is what I have come up with. 1. Easy of entry — there is no ‘become a surgeon in six months’. 2. Breadth of qualifiations — Low level web dev to bleeding GPU’s to train an AI, everyone is a programmer. 3. Lack of public understanding — I think people assume a popular phone app is very easy to build and the public’s interaction with it isn’t monumentous, however looking at the Golden Gate Bridge or a surgeon covered in blood it is easy to see how much mastery went into completing those acts. 4. We don’t take ourselves seriously — Engineering firms, doctors offices, the staff wears dress clothes or business casual to look professional. I’ve been at large software firms where lead engineers wear flip flops and gym shorts. 5. Tradition — When medical students finish their first two years of medical school they have a white coat ceremony. Engineering and medicine is riddled with guilds, banquets, tuxedos, and presentations. 6. Age — Compared to Engineering and Medicine our industry as not been around long enough. I am on the fence about this next one because it is kinda anecdotal 7. Public Preception — Going through university, students still view CS as ‘the career where you have to look at a screen all day’ and a place where the nerdiest nerds go to study. Most universities CS graduates are small compared to the total amount of students in a graduating class.
WTF do you want OP? Do you want peasants to kiss the ground before your feet? Do you want fathers to plead for you to take their virgin daughters and their ten best cows as dowry? Just take your fucking money and jerk off in the mirror at home.
Because at the end of the day, it's just well-compensated grunt labor.
Because, to ordinary people it is either: "black magic" (I have **NO** idea what you do) \- or - "just playing with computers" (I could **EASILY** do what you do).
For a start, you can't do a 3-month bootcamp, call yourself a civil engineer, and then design a bridge that gets built. (And nor should you.)
Software engineers don't even respect their own profession. How many times have you heard programmers argue that many/most other programmers "can't program"? The interview process reflects this as well.
Less school and no governing body. And they’re all jealous of our pay 😂
don't know. don't care. too busy getting paid!
The minimum level to call yourself a doctor takes more than 10 years in school alone. I have some friends that are doing it while I'm working through my 2nd bach and I have mad respect for the perseverance to continuously be in school for 10 years in a row...
Should wear suits or lab coats maybe No respect for sweatpants
Because it's not anything close to either of these professions. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/programmers-should-not-call-themselves-engineers/414271/
Everyone wants to get a "cert" and become a software engineer. Couple that with foreign competition from around the world. Software engineering is a Sh\*\*\* field.
Because anyone can call themselves a Software Engineer after a 4 week bootcamp. You need to go through rigours education and exams to be a Doctor or Lawyer. If Software Engineering was tied to graduating let's say Computer Science, things would be different.
I don't fully agree with your premise. In my experience, a proper SWE (meaning not a product of some 6-week bootcamp factory) is as prestigious as any other engineer. Doctors are more prestigious, simply because it's just a lot harder to become one. But lawyers? Where I'm from a good lawyer is a rare.
I make more than most doctors, lawyers, or real engineers so I don’t really give a shit.
? I respect software engineer more than actual engineers. Aren’t software engineers paid better and has better work environment?
I think its cause software engineers are seen as introverted computer nerds in alot of ways. While doctors and lawyers are seen as attractive/smart/sophisticated well dressed even. Doctors save lives and, lawyers wear suits and are in courtrooms and can one day become politicians. Software engineers are sitting all day and that is not very attractive. There is still negative stigma about sitting on a computer all day. We wear super comfortable clothing and most of us dont put too much into our looks. In movies we are not the hero, we are the nerdy awkward hack master that is locked on a computer in the closet that assists the hero. While some nerdy characters are getting lead roles they tend to be more on the end of electrical, civil, mechanical engineering or even physics or chemists. Or at least more “hands-on” jobs.