This is a new satire site, right? These days it’s getting harder and harder to differentiate between reality and fiction in tech. The rest of their posts are pretty much spot on.
Reality in Canada.
It’s a good thing that Engineer is a protected profession and not everyone can claim it, like Lawyer or Doctor.
In the US now it’s “oh you’re an engineer? Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?”
I disagree, I believe the regulatory agencies do nothing in Canada to legitimize their claim to regulating software development. Heck, they do nothing for electronics or semiconductors or anything smaller than the power grid.
Software development is done by developers. If you are a software engineer chances are you’re working on software infrastructure that actually apply at scales that are not “add a shopping cart to this blog”.
There are reasons you ask a civil engineer for work.
You missed my point that if professional engineering societies in Canada want to take ownership of software and electronics, they better do something and not just say they’re regulating it and sit on it with no clear definition for what it even is.
If they were doing their job, we wouldn’t need to debate what a software engineer is. They’ve let us down and they’re getting away with it.
They’re regulating engineering of software and electronics.
From Engineers Canada;
In the case of software engineering, a piece of software (or a software-intensive system) can therefore be considered an engineering work if both of the following conditions are true:
• The development of the software required “the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software.”
• There is a reasonable expectation that failure or inappropriate functioning of the system would result in harm to life, health, property, economic interests, the public welfare, or the natural environment.
That does seem to me well defined. If you disagree then it’s okay.
Edit: taken from this: https://engineerscanada.ca/sites/default/files/public-policy/professional-practice-software-engineering-en.pdf which also add context.
I cannot speak about electronics as my education was in software engineering.
Not so much well defined as fancy words. There is no example of a paying software development job that has no economic impact if the software were to fail.
If I ran a small shopify page for goat feed, I’d be an engineer for making sure the site stayed working so farmers could order their feed. It could even put lives at risk!
It really only excludes someone privately working on a video game for fun.
So given that, what are they actually regulating? What are they providing to their members to help them become better “software engineers”. I say it’s nothing at all? +
If you’re a software engineer, you’re applying an engineering process to the field of software development. Adding a shopping cart to a blog can be a perfectly sound solution to the problem at hand.
Engineering becomes more important at scale, but scale itself doesn’t define engineering.
That’s missing the point. Engineers perform at a specific level. You don’t expect civil engineers to build the bridge. Can they do it? Sure. But that’s not the profession. Same with Structural Engineers, Chemical Engineers, Industrial Engineers, etc. They are at a higher level in the planification and execution process and will likely have signatory responsibilities on the project. If the bridge falls, the engineer does have explaining to do.
The equivalent for a software engineer would be (in the US) more at the level of architect with responsibilities higher than developers.
But engineers is not a protected term so everyone is an engineer now.
That’s a very arbitrary delineation that just seems to be something you worked out backwards to support your claim. I’m an EE and software developer and I sometimes do projects involving both fields (which would be computer engineering, I guess), and there’s really not that much difference. I certainly don’t see why I would label half of it engineering and the other half not.
You can be web dev with an engineering degree
The name of the website is a play on the satire website the onion, it’s satire.
Thanks, I didn’t even notice. It’s not a normal decision that would be made, but sometimes there’s weird stuff buried deep in the paperwork.
I don’t take any article post or comment seriously anymore. Between the era of misinformation and advancements in AI, my trust in the internet is at an all time low.
Make your own decisions, second guess everything
Funny enough, I probably did more software engineering as a web dev than I did as a software engineer at some companies.
In the UK, at least, the only difference typically between a web developer and a software engineer is £15-20k in salary. Frankly, we’re all software engineers…
I still wouldn’t say software engineering is actual engineering.
You mean you wouldn’t expect a software engineer to understand the coefficient of thermal expansion of tungsten carbide in a gas lubricated piston/cylinder pneumatic deadweight calibration system?
Yeah, me either. But I would expect one to know how to research the documentation to find out what it meant.
Even though my job title has “engineer” in it, I don’t agree that it should be considered an area of engineering.
Yeah, me either. But I would expect one to know how to research the documentation to find out what it meant.
I wouldn’t even expect most of them to this kind of research, no. On top of that, I see “engineering” also carrying some type of accountability and responsibility. For example, civil engineering, there are often regulatory bodies, codes, and standards that engineers must adhere to, and they are legally responsible for the safety and integrity of their projects. While in the software side of things, standards and best practices are more loose. Unless you’re working in safety critical industries (automotive, aviation, etc…), the “accountability structure” is completely different, if existent at all. Calling themselves Software developer or some derivate would make much more from my point of view.
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I think the idea is, most people could build a doghouse with no training, but you need planning and education to plan/build a skyscraper. If you want to write your own app at home, maybe no software planning is really required. Keep nailing in workarounds. But if you want to build a huge system, you need to do a bit more than workarounds. You need a good plan from the start to make it all efficient and in a manner others can contribute to the code base.
That said, I feel like just having workarounds is really common even in large industry settings. Maybe I’m wrong though. I’m more of a home doghouse builder type myself.
Anyone can build a bridge. Only an engineer can build a bridge that barely stands.
In the same way, the fact that one built a large online platform, that doesn’t necessarily mean it was built with minimal ressources and without taking past or future risk.
Engineering is, as a profession, specifically the application of scientific principles to solve problems the right way, the first time, that is to say efficiently, and with minimal risk.
The fact that one codes, or wields a wrench, or operates a C&C machine does not mean one is applying science to solve problems efficiently and managing risk. These are entirely different skills and professions.
And software development isn’t actually development. They don’t build houses!
Did you mean to say software architecture?
What about software painting ?
Can’t wait to see the next Mona Lisa of software as an exhibition at the Louvre!
Why? Excited to hear another internet hot take
The only real software engineer anymore is Linus Torvalds, everyone else stands on the shoulders of giants.
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His name was Terry Davis
His name was Terry Davis.
His name was Terry Davis.
His name is Terry Davis
It’s still is, but that would be a bad joke on my end.
Still is? I’m afraid I have bad news for you…
his name is still Terry Davis. “His name was Terry Davis”
He was genuinely a really good developer. It’s unfortunate that he was schizophrenic.
Are you doing that thing where you troll by saying something really stupid and wait for others to correct you?
No, I believe it’s called a joke
No, jokes have structure. It could be sarcasm but it could as easily be trolling.
I take back my chuckle
Are you?
No, you made a statement. I asked a question. My question isn’t a troll since it has a clear yes or no answer.
An answer you’ve failed to provide.
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Like… every engineer?
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they should also ban web developers who refer to themselves as ninjas, especially code ninjas
Ah yes, I’ve spent decades cringing when I meet a self-proclaimed or even peer-proclaimed “rockstar”, “ninja”, “guru”, “jedi”, or probably a half dozen other “cool” designations for a tech worker.
rockstar
We fixed that one: https://codewithrockstar.com/
What if you do it ironically? Like calling yourself a Code Ninja Jedi 10x Rockstar 🚀?
Ninjas, super-heroes, black-belt and terms like that are known gender-excluders. I’ve been through a couple of adjustment sessions for company standard job descriptions and it’s unreal how you can change the applicant mix by wording.
Bullshit. This started long ago. We’re deep in the midst of it now.
Lol. tinder fact checks bios? Hilarious…
I have a CS Masters degree and it says engineer on it.
Did you Master Engineering Computer Scientists?
No. Counter strike
Unironically this. Started playing on the campus network in my master’s year.
Darn skippy I did! Not much of a web designer, though.
There is a difference between Computer Science and >!web development!< though.
“web development” casts a wide net.
The classic imagery of someone playing with frontpage back in the day, or screwing around with html in a text editor, sure. But those folks wouldn’t call themselves web developers (there was a phase over 20 years ago where anyone that cobbled together a geocities would declare ‘web developer’ on their resume, but I haven’t seen someone do that in ages).
However, you can get in pretty deep with code running in the browser as javascript and/or wasm. Backend gives them some nested dictionary in json or protobuf and they parse, manipulate, iterate over it, sometimes making some pretty complex visualizations. Basically a ‘web developer’ is nowadays on par with any Game or GUI application developer in terms of what they might be writing. There are a few things left out of direct reach by a browser runtime, but you have access to plenty and the backend abstractions to get something in reach of HTTP are often no easier than the thing being abstracted, it’s just reframed as ‘http’.
There really isn’t. For example web browsers can execute assembly now and a good “web developer” (I’d call them a software engineer) will use assembly where appropriate.
With WebUSB (supported in Chrome) and the possibility to build web applications to controls physical devices there’s definitely some web developers who can claim to be proper engineers even in the strict definitions
can we ban web developers who call themselves “developers”?
also php programmers who call themselves anything?
Nah, no need for this kind of gatekeeping. Anyone who deals with js and its billions of frameworks on a daily basis deserves to be called a developer.
Agreed.
We also deserve to be called, every so often, to see how we’re doing.
Heyyy its your super duper new project manager! I hope you are feeling a-mazing because you are my a-ce on the team. Anyways i need you to do things twice as fast, because we are running low on budget after sales promised another feature without extra billing and the CEO already signed off on it. Please make this happen somehow. If this project isn’t succesfull i’ll get fired and have to sell the house. But no pressure!
Do you even know why you hate PHP?
For me, it was this
https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-real-escape-string.php
Note that that hasn’t existed in PHP for years.
Blame MySQL for that. The PHP API just mirrors the MySQL C API of the same name. https://dev.mysql.com/doc/c-api/8.0/en/mysql-real-escape-string.html
Modern PHP doesn’t use it - any modern code uses PDO with prepared statements.
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Never used it in over 23 years of using PHP. Also, I don’t thing that has existed anymore for the past 10 years or so?
Seriously, if we’re going to do this, can we also bitch about painful java apps from 10 years ago, or the hilariously shitty modules in node from 10 years ago? I can go on for a while, but you hopefully get the point.
The question was why do I hate it, and it was because of this. I don’t understand your confusion.
My confusion is that you hate it tosay because someone over a decade ago wrote 10 times the same complaint that was mostly fixed already since about a decade ago
yeah, i’ve used it and it’s absolutely trash…
but here’s an article that sums up my feelings: https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/That article is over a decade old. A lot of these issues aren’t relevant any more or have been fixed. Some weren’t even PHP issues, for example mysql_real_escape_string is a MySQL API (https://dev.mysql.com/doc/c-api/8.0/en/mysql-real-escape-string.html).
PHP isn’t the best language, but it’s not as bad as some people claim it to be, especially if you use a good framework like Laravel.
lol, no… it sucks
trust me, if you’ve already gotten used to php, you’re smart enough to learn a better language.
really just use node if you’re going that sorta route…Nice troll
JavaScript has a lot of the same issues as PHP. It doesn’t have some of the same core library issues because it doesn’t have a good core library.
ECMA 6 has had drastic improvements over the past js…
however node is still infinitely better than php, and since javascript is inexorably a part of web development, it’s a lot more logical to use it on the backend too…i don’t mean that node is great, i mean that it’s an easy transition from php, a billion times better, and much more modern and useful… so a very natural transition…
ECMA 6 has had drastic improvements over the past js…
Sure, but it still lacks basic built-in features. For example, why do maps and sets not have sort or filter methods? In Node, why is there no built-in way to connect to a database of any sort? Why can Node.js apps only use a single time zone? Requiring libraries for everything is not ideal as the libraries vary wildly in quality and they can end up either abandoned or containing malware (which has happened several times in the Node ecosystem).
still infinitely better than php
They each have their pros and cons, depending on use case. Node.js does some things better than PHP, but the opposite is true too.
- You can build a whole PHP website without using any third-party libraries, and it’ll work on any web host that supports PHP (literally any good web host that exists today). There’s value in having that level of flexibility.
- You can build a PHP site today and it’ll mostly still be working (maybe with some minor changes) in 5 years, whereas for some of my Node.js sites I have to switch to an older version of Node just to build them. For example https://obviousspoilers.com/ has been practically untouched since 2009.
- The fact that PHP can run multiple apps in the same FPM process means that you can run thousands of sites on a single server without issues. There’s some non-Node solutions to this (like Cloudflare workers) but they’re mostly proprietary at the moment.
- There are more PHP than Node.js jobs, and far more sites use PHP. Wordpress uses PHP and powers over 40% of the web, so that means that at least 40% of all websites use PHP.
oh and, adding a library isn’t very hard
Adding a third-party library in PHP is just as easy. The
composer.jsonfile looks very similar to apackage.json.
That is literally a decade old article with basically 1 complaint that sometimes functions are strpos() and sometimes str_len(). Anything else it’s saying is “I don’t even know how to say it”. Really now? Any of your complaints have been fixed since about a decade ago, so why don’t you give it a try?
lol, no…
also this is a joke sub so stop trying to sea lion me about it.
also your “summation” of the article is pretty stupid
Just like my
$variablesI can be anything I want. Deal with it! 🫳🎤As if webapps aren’t usurping mobile and desktop apps, anything not C# or .NET is a toy language?
c# and .net? ewww…
gimme c, c++, go, rust, ruby, python…
and umm, no dude, native apps are a lot more powerful than web apps… they are not usurped at allthere’s more of them, but there’s more scooters than motorcycles…
Scooters are more efficient, get you where you need to go and cost less to maintain. Your analogy is actually pretty good in that regard.
yeah and they only get you around the neighborhood, any actual distance and a motorcycle is infinitely better…
but, it figures you’d miss that, since you’re a dumby dumbo mcpoopoo head webdevNow you’re throwing ad hominem around. You don’t need to be toxic to communicate your point, web development did at one point have a lot of growing to do and I can admit that there is still plenty of progress to be made. In 2024 however, ignoring the web ecosystem as any type of developer is purely traditionalist elitism.
bruh, this is programming_humor… chill, im sure you’re a fine human being
Please refrain of using offensive words, specially if you are trying to actually communicate an idea that is by all means demeaning to other people. The community is about humour, keep that in mind ;)
word, “dumb ass” was supposed to be a joke too, but i edited it to be less offensive
So if I’m using Rust to write a web app that compiles to WebAsm, what am I?
a dingo
To be fair, we do develop stuff. Nothing implies quality, so it’s not like we’re misrepresenting anything. Personally, anyone who calls themselves a software engineer and works with any web-related technology (PHP, JavaScript, etc) are the ones to be shunned.
🖕
sorry, my browser doesn’t support unicode
I mean who cares? But also why? My old job title was “software engineer” and I just did web dev.
it’s satire
Honestly, nobody should call themselves an engineer unless they literally drive trains for a living.
Driving a train is engineering?
In North America, the driver of a train engine is called an “engineer”, yes.
I see, TIL. That’s different from Germany, where Ingenieur is a protected term.
In the railway context an engineer was the person who worked the engine.
In German the word comes from Latin roughly meaning inventor. Presumably the general usage of the word engineer in English has the same etymology.
See I’d call that a conductor
In the US, a conductor is the one who checks tickets, makes announcements, and delegates tasks to the crew to help ensure things keep moving on time.
The locomotive engineer is the one who is “driving” the train. They run the engine and communicate with dispatch and traffic control to keep them informed where this particular train is fitting into the overall juggling act,. They also make every effort to keep things safe (watching for signals, obstructions, etc.).
I’m not 100% sure if the terminology is different outside of the Us.
(Source: My father is a 3rd generation locomotive engineer.)
See I thought a conductor was a person who grabs a live main wire while standing in water.
Infrastructure erasure in the states is so bad that people who build it for a living aren’t even considered anymore.
Funny and infromative
In many countries the term “engineer” is a protected title.
Yes, driving trains is becoming more and more important as we find out how terrible cars are for the environment. We should protect the profession fiercely!
Or they build trebuchets
I mean, engineering is really problem solving, and not do we web developers solve problems. We may have made most of them ourselves, and new ones when we solve those, but we do solve problems.
The term engineering is not about problem-solving, especially when differentiated from development. Engineering is about deliberate understanding and decision-making, about giving it an architecture, a structure.
You can develop without any structure, solving an issue, without understanding a bigger context or picture or behavior. But that’s not engineering.
Engineering is the use of scientific knowledge to achieve specific goals.
As long as they don’t start building tunnels under their house because they’re an ‘engineer’…
Nobody give them stamps!
🎶 … trust me, Im an engineer I think I put this thing right here … 🎶
I get this is satire but people truly believe this. Web devs literally create software that runs nearly every facet of modern life.
As a non-software engineer, feels weird that they’re making this distinction.
I don’t have much to do with engines either.
I take engineer to mean: designs stuff that does some task, involving SOME kind of calculation.
Visual designer: not an engineer
Piping designer: not an engineer (although this one felt weird, that’s what the piping designer corrected me to say, so)
Chemical engineer: ya
Mechanical engineer: yeah
Software engineer: totally different flavour, but still yeah
Language is what we want it to be.
Web designers presumably still need to script things, I reckon that counts 👍
Now this is the kind of ‘news’ I’d like to see posted on hackernews just to read their techbro shit takes.
I perused the comments and didn’t see anyone mention this. The term “engineer” is regulated by every state in the US. I doubt they had Tinder in mind, but calling yourself an “engineer” without having a Professional Engineer license is illegal, at least when it comes to offering professional engineering services. It’s a protected title so that schools and bridges don’t get built by scammers–at least that was the intention. I can legally call myself an Engineer!
Just go get your license, and you should be golden lol.
