this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2026
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Nah, good engineers are retiring, bad engineers are running rampant. You give yourself away calling us engineers, we were never, except for some yearly title increase instead of money. Just programmers, and that is fine. 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.
Does the same argument apply to calling ~~janitors~~ custodians "sanitation engineers"? I've seen that some places.
Like, if the word "custodian" is too offensive, then maybe it's just because the job sucks and comes with stigma, and anything you call it is going to sound derogatory after a few years...
I get that it's a critical job, and the people in those roles should be treated with dignity and respect like everyone else. The social stigma is wrong, for sure. But simply changing the title doesn't solve anything...
What? That's a very different situation than what I was talking about with software development. I thought I pretty clearly outlined the core of what it means to be an engineer- Custodians aren't doing engineering work. As you said, that doesn't make the role less important or less deserving of dignity.
Just calling someone an engineer because it sounds better is silly and demeans both the actual role and the work that engineers do.
Okay, so the argument does not apply to that situation. A simple "no" would have sufficed...
It is more useful to explain why something is wrong
Yeah the explanation was fine but the "What? That's a very different situation" seemed unnecessarily hostile. But maybe it just have my panties in a bunch today, it could be me
I wasn't intentionally trying to be rude, it genuinely took me aback. I'm sorry to have come across that way.
From my perspective, tt felt like you hadn't actually read my argument and were responding in bad faith, since this comparison is the sort of thing that people say to dismiss software engineering as a sort of thought-terminating cliche.
Oh, my bad. I didn't really need to take offense to it, I was probably just grumpy and didn't know what else to say. It wasn't that big a deal.
But no, I wasn't trying to be dismissive of your argument qua software engineering, but I see how it came off that way. I think it was a good argument, I was just bringing up something tangentially related out of nothing more than free-association style banter. In hindsight it wasn't really that relevant to the conversation anyway...