In fact, in some Canadian provinces, titles in computing such as “software engineer,” “computer engineer,” and others containing “engineer” are (in principle) reserved for people licensed as engineers by the provincial engineering regulator.

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.

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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...

So instance of SWE1 we become SWD1. I don't see the difference.

The difference is for others than "engineers" (software developers), where there is an expectation of certain quality when they hear someone call themselves "engineer". Just like the title "doctor" carries a certain expectation.

"Doctor" is a funny one because physicians originally latched onto the term to try and give themselves the credibility where they previously had none. Its use in medicine is in a lot of ways similar to the software situation.

So language police.

It seems reasonable to want licensure on the belief that it raises quality.

It seems unreasonable to expect people to conform to your language preferences.

So what about like "mechanical engineers" or "process engineers" or "hardware engineer" or "biomedical engineers" etc?

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.

I suspect this is not because of the fake engineers but rather because other forces, e.g. management wanted more efficiency and security was the last item on the list. I don't see how changing job titles would change anything here

FYI: Mechanical and hardware engineers, in the appropriate language of the country, are already protected engineering titles in a lot of European countries.

Calling yourself a „dipl. Ing. <X>“ would be a crime if you don’t possess the appropriate degree.

Yes, but at least in Germany the "Dipl." makes the difference. I think it'd be OK to call yourself a "Software Engineer" without a degree and this is what many people do.

The infrastructure-getting-hacked thing is wild to me! Something went very wrong early in the design process!

I notice that software-related professions tend be named after traditionally male-dominated fields, such as "software engineer" or "software architect" or even the "rock star programmer".

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-...

I think only some software work is engineering and if I call myself a software engineer (in regard to my employment), it’s because it’s actually “a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software”. And not just paying lip service. Otherwise, I’m something else with or even without the word software in the title (even if I work with software). Outside of work, I inherently consider myself a software engine but if work requires it, I have no problems treating it as less.

My degree is Software Engineering, and is fully accredited by the Australian Institute of Engineers.

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

Can you elaborate on the extra courses? What are America's developers missing (I imagine ethics is glaringly missed)?

I imagine ethics is glaringly missed

You imagine wrong. Everyone I know with a software-engineering-type degree took a mandatory ethics course.

Ugh. It's called engineering because in the beginning each university built or bought one computer. That machine was either owned by the mathematics department or the electrical engineering department (for hopefully obvious reasons). Fast forward a few decades and we have the twin disciplines of Computer Science and Software Engineering.

What makes software development engineering

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

Author begins by describing the complexity crisis that folks tried to address at 1968 NATO SEC but then talks about engineering as a problem-solving effort involving calculations and caches.

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.

The "complexity crisis" isn't a solvable problem. Complexity is a reality in software engineering just like wind loading is a reality in structural engineering. You can't "solve" the wind and you can't "solve" complexity. That's where engineering comes in.

For the past couple of months, I've been doing a deep dive into engineering and engineering philosophy, and I have some thoughts about this article.

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.

Application programs were really considered software until at least the 1970s

Did you mean "were not"?

"Software engineering" is the corporate aspect concerned with the "right" way to do stuff, often picking inadequate analogies from physical manufacturing and traditional engineering. It builds the ungainly, monolith dinosaurs and the technical debt. It is OOP, enterprise Java with the abstract factories, MFC, "agile methodologies" and "agentic workflows". It creates the dogma and the ideologies.

"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.

Your first point is describing "overengineering" which can also be a fatal problem in traditional engineering fields.

It's easy to overengineer in software because the marginal cost of materials and logistics is ~$0. Overshooting by a mile is free. That doesn't discount the value of proper software engineering.