A most rational stance. One we should enforce here in the US.

Edit: Yes, I'm arguing that Software Engineer should be a licensed profession, but programmer shouldn't, and would be a fine substitution in the cases where you didn't need rigor.

--

If I were an engineer, there's no way I would trust any interface to a control system for a water purification plant that connected to the internet and allowed for ingress of control. Just as an example.

The OPM hack of 2015[1] is the worst case, in terms of national security, that clearly proves no Engineers were involved in the design of their computer system. Ingress of control should be absolutely prohibited, and it wasn't. I don't know why that database was ever put into a computer, instead of filing cabinets in a vault, nor why it was ever connected to any other system, and not completely air-gapped in said vault, with manual controlled exfiltration of data upon request.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Office_of_Personnel_Manag...

"Programming" is the creative tinkering aspect where you start from scratch and approach a problem from a new light. This is how Unix was born. It is the 1000-line program that is composable, fun to read and write and will last a long time.

Is it a surprise the complexity crisis continues? Dependencies rage out of control in modern systems, creating all sorts of havoc, including security issues. The academy seems to have little interest in this.

https://www.hillelwayne.com/tags/crossover-project/

the tl;dr is that for the most part, modern software development is very similar to engineering

Which is strange since the original "computers" were predominately women[0] and I find writing software has much in common with activities that were historically at least coed, such as creating recipes or sewing patterns.

Yet we never hear of "software chefs" or "software tailors". Given how little many titular heads of software companies understand their product, "software nanny" would also be applicable.

[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-...

Thankfully I didn't get that job and my life trajectory continued upward. Unfortunately for that team they needed exactly what their manager was critical of - some semblance of rigor around the software they built. Of course I would indeed prefer that people who build airplanes and bridges are held to a high standard for doing their job but a person building what is essentially a glorified spreadsheet in app form might not consistently need the same.

It was two years longer than computer science, and all of those extra courses were with the “mainstream” Engineers.

Wishful thinking and brand inflation. Same thing that makes machine learning artificial intelligence.

The biggest thing I noticed was that, even though there was an acknowledgment of the lack of a singular definition of engineering, the definition used throughout was tied to a linear model of innovation. I've been able to trace this thinking to the 1920s, with a growth in popularity in the 1940s and 1950s. A prime example is Vannevar Bush's Science: The Endless Frontier. Although the report had some good outcomes, like leading to the establishment of the National Science Foundation, Bush's own autobiography acknowledged that this model was a disservice to engineers and engineering, as it led to many engineering accomplishments being touted as scientific achievements and scientists getting credit for the work of engineers in popular literature and the press.

There aren't too many other views of engineering out there. A handful of contemporary authors keep coming up: Florman, Vincenti, Ferguson, Koen, and Petroski. Most other things I've read tend to cite one or more of these authors and continue to build upon their foundations.

Picking up any one of the other perspectives on engineering would let you make another connection to the 1968 NATO conference. There were really three camps that offered definitions about what software engineering should be. People like Dijkstra, Hoare, Naur, and Wirth focused on applying mathematics and computer science and on theory building. McIlroy, Bauer, and Bemer looked at how software development could learn from industrial engineering and mass production. David and Ross emphasized practical problem solving. By the 1969 conference, the practical problem-solving piece had dropped out of focus, even though this is very closely related to how other engineering philosophers looked at engineering.

Another aspect from some of the engineering philosophers is the craft roots of engineering. This also tends to disprove the linear model of innovation. Engineering existed well before modern science, and there are several cases of engineering development without a robust scientific understanding of the principles that enable it. Modern science became a tool in the toolbox of modern engineers, but it's not a precursor to engineering. The craft roots have been there all along and were part of engineering education up into the early 1900s. This can tie back into Agile Software Development and the software craftsmanship movement of the 1990s and early 2000s.

The paragraph about application programming being removed from the debates in the 1960s misses a key point. In the 1960s, "software" was shorthand for "systems software", or the stuff provided by computer manufacturers to allow people to make their computers do stuff. Application programs were not really considered software until at least the 1970s. It's a bit nuanced, but there's a reason for excluding this group of people: it was seen as a different thing entirely.

Finally, no mention of Margaret Hamilton. Failing to even mention Hamilton and her use of software engineering as an aspiration to elevate programmers to the same status as the other engineering disciplines on the Apollo program misses a huge moment in the development of the idea of software engineering.

Did you mean "were not"?