Technology

Engineer is a whole other thing from the steam age, my BSc was in Math, worked fine to get me in.

As a mechanical engineer, I would beg to differ. When you strip away all the fancy math, engineering is ultimately about critical thought and solving problems/achieving functionality with limited resources. As one of my professors liked to say, "Anyone can build a bridge to support a load, but only an engineer can design a bridge that just barely holds that load."

Engineering is an ancient domain that goes back to the very beginnings of civilization and continues to grow with our needs as we progress. Where once it was just mechanical, we now have domains like electrical, materials, and biomedical engineering. If we've hit a point where we need engineers who specialize in software, why shouldn't we welcome in a new domain?

While it does feel weird calling software developers 'engineers', that is arguably what they do. It's no less reductionist to suggest they are just programmers than it is to suggest that mechanical engineers are simply CAD and Excel jockeys. There's a layer of comprehension about the systems in play and how they can be manipulated that gets lost in the reduction.

My only real sticking point about software engineers where I tend to push back is that Professional Engineer is a legally protected title and indicates licensure, at least in the US. It requires the right degree(s) and several years of work supervised by a PE to qualify for that licensure. The importance of the PE license is that you are recognized as an authority in your field- for good or ill. You can make big decisions, but you will also be held accountable if something goes wrong.

In my experience, many software engineers brush aside the importance of those types of qualifications because their field wasn't quite as rigorous to enter. As we continue to develop a society where software mistakes can absolutely kill people (e.g. self-driving vehicles, robots, automated decision tools in medicine and insurance, etc) or cause massive economic damage, it's critical that we decide how software engineers play a role in preventing those things and how we hold them accountable when they don't.