Engineers have legal liability for the designs they approve. Software developers do not. We can use whatever words we want but most of the people who have decided to apply the word engineer to software dev, don’t even know what the word means.
When a bridge collapses, the PE who signed off on the drawing is going to end up in court. Even the most spectacular software failure will never blow back on the programming staff.
There was actually some movement to try and get this kind of thing setup for software at one point. I think with IEEE, but it fell through. Software can have life or death consequences too, and it’s time we start treating it as such.
If you want me to call you an engineer, develop and FE and PE exam. Require that all commercial software have source code and docs signed off on by a PE who is legally accountable for harm caused by the software.
This doesn’t happen because the people who own software companies DO NOT WANT IT TO. And accordingly, I do not want to use the word engineer to describe their staff.
Engineers have legal liability for the designs they approve. Software developers do not. We can use whatever words we want but most of the people who have decided to apply the word engineer to software dev, don’t even know what the word means.
When a bridge collapses, the PE who signed off on the drawing is going to end up in court. Even the most spectacular software failure will never blow back on the programming staff.
There was actually some movement to try and get this kind of thing setup for software at one point. I think with IEEE, but it fell through. Software can have life or death consequences too, and it’s time we start treating it as such.
If you want me to call you an engineer, develop and FE and PE exam. Require that all commercial software have source code and docs signed off on by a PE who is legally accountable for harm caused by the software.
This doesn’t happen because the people who own software companies DO NOT WANT IT TO. And accordingly, I do not want to use the word engineer to describe their staff.