Ask HN: Why does everyone need to be an "Engineer" these days?

This is nothing new. The "engineerification" in the United States has been going on for the past 40-50 years. I still remember when "trash men" became "sanitation engineers" back in the 80's!

When someone tells me they're an engineer I ask about how hard the PE was. That's when you find out if someone is an actual engineer from a legal perspective or just affixing the term to themselves.

I lived with someone who designed bridges for a living but couldn't yet call himself an engineer. The Engineer on his team was the person qualified to sign the drawings drafted by others, verifying that they met certain standards. The man I lived with was studying for the PE exam [0] pouring over large books of standards he would need to know in order to call himself an Engineer.

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[0] https://ncees.org/exams/pe-exam/

> a large number of good software developers treat their profession as an engineering discipline and have earned the title of "Engineer"

It's just a word, this one is on you for thinking the word is special.

And I don't think it's relevant to discuss other-industry-specific engineer qualifications or what it means in Canada - if you are in an industry/country where the word engineer means something special, then this is a non-issue because it's enforced by laws and regulations. If you aren't, you're applying the standard in a place where it's not applicable.

Humans are hierarchical social creatures who crave respect, prestige, admiration, etc. Inflating job titles is an easy way to increase the value of the job to the worker by giving them more social capital.

People will stretch titles as much as possible. "Senior" engineers who have 2 years of experience after a coding bootcamp. "Managers" and "Directors" in marketing/HR/finance/etc who are 24 years old and have no managerial responsibility. Nurse practitioners who want to call themselves "doctors".

In this case "engineer" is the stretch title that provides that value.

Status and titles are important to many people. Bestowing a title is a free way for companies to satisfy that itch for their employee. "Engineer" is not a formal credential or legally protected title in the USA.

All sorts of jobs have rebranded.

    Janitor -> Janitorial Engineer
    Garbage Man -> Sanitation Engineer
    Cheater -> Rules interpretation Engineer
    Guard -> Correctional Officer
    Programmer -> Software Engineer

It's valid. Engineer means the role requires applying math and sciences. There could be a Potato Farmer, and then a Potato Engineer that measures crops in time and space, solves growth optimization problems, and researches solutions for plagues, etc. Then there are Potato Scientists that would deal with classification, genetics and so on.

The problem is using it as a prestige tag without requiring the skills. The company is wasting resources if they do so.

Whats the difference between a software engineer and a programmer? One of them has a job

This reminds me of a funny interaction I had with one of my best friends and his father. My friend is an industrial engineer.

We were having a big dinner with a bunch of folks at a restaurant downtown after a wedding. My friend must have used the word "engineer" as least 5 times in 30 minutes while talking to some people that we had just met.

My friend's father interrupts him and says: "you keep calling yourself an engineer. You're an industrial engineer. That's like winning $10 after playing a rec league baseball game and then calling yourself a professional ball player."

Awkward moment at first but I think it was absolutely hilarious.

My friend is a chemical engineer and I found it really annoying when people revere his suggestions on anything mechanical like fixing a sink. Like an engineering title makes you an expert on anything mechanical.

That’s when I switched from programmer to software engineer actually.

In some countries "engineer" is a regulated title, e.g. in Germany. You can't name yourself an engineer if you don't have an engineering or related degree. Depending on the industry that title has more or less meaning, I can call myself an engineer, but that was never relevant to any of my tasks.

I think it comes from the same desire to call yourself "tech company", it is a signifier about how you see yourself. The difference between an X and an X engineer is that the X engineer sees himself as approaching the world in a rational and technical way. In some sense it is just an euphemism, to make something mundane sound more professional.

Time for my title to change from Software Engineer to Software Surgeon.

Software Engineering is not yet standardized as a proper role, at least in the US. The boundaries are fuzzy and often overlap a lot with management and business related tasks and responsibilities. In my opinion this is definitely a problem for setting proper expectations and hiring the right people. Companies are definitely bending the role to suit whatever needs are necessary from the business standpoint. For example a decade or two ago there was more a difference between responsibilities of creating software requirements, testing, and measuring the usage, but these have shifted considerably and are mostly done by the feature level engineer.

Engineers have become something like Product Technologists, or a generalist technical person that must also produce and manage a slice of the overall product from idea to launch and analytics. It would be great if the role was formalized and it added guard rails to the industry in order to avoid this never-ending evolving definition of the role.

It's marketing puffery, basically. I refer to myself as a "software engineer" when I'm talking to people who expect that to be the term to mean "experienced developer" (it's good to speak the language your audience understands), but I prefer to call myself a "developer".

Here's a fun anecdote about the Software Engineer title from a previous job

I'm in Alberta, Canada and my understanding is "Engineer" is a protected title here. My team was made up of some programmers who had actual engineering degrees, who had Software Engineer as their job title. They wore the ring and everything. The rest of us were "Software Developers", which is honestly really fine with me

We wound up merging with a company based in the USA, including merging with their software team. Of course all of their programmers were "Software Engineers" but none had actual engineering certification.

I brought this up with the department head at one point. I was concerned that the new programmers with Engineer titles would be given more weight compared to those of us with Developer titles, despite not actually having any additional credential over us. I was assured that would not be the case. In fact he acted appalled that I would even suggest something like that. After all it's just a title and of course everyone is too smart to get blinded by job titles

Anyways you can probably guess how it wound up playing out in reality

Job title worship is a real thing

Writing software has nothing to do with operating a locomotive, and very few who write software wear stripey hats; it's not really engineering either.

It's title inflation. Firms get to choose the job title, so they choose a prestigious one because it makes the position more attractive

I remember a time when software programmers did NOT want to be referred to as "engineers" as that had more of a ops-guy connotation, like someone who sets up servers and runs cable. They wanted to be called "software developers". I even remember when it was fashionable to be called "systems analyst".