It's great at that, had a colleague run a diff through Claude and it explained how the new code was better and how the optimizations worked. Then my colleague realised they'd run the diff the wrong way round, fed Claude the new diff and Claude happily explained how the new code was better and how the optimizations worked.
I am so fucking glad i pivoted to teaching. Now I run a Makerspace and teach young nerds creative problem solving. The pay is less but every day is a joy.
I'm realizing how over engineered Claude's solutions are. I have realized now just today that it's best at just dding tiny updates to code. Not good at architecting anything new at all that has to work for longer than 5 days.
I spent like an hour yesterday bullying Claude out of using a ResizeObserver, Refs and a useEffect construct just to fix the height of a container (there was a bug where the container didn't properly scale down in height because some weird hard-coded properties in an external component inside of it). I knew that it had to be solvable with just the right css selector, but I was lazy and didn't want to manually go through the html and figure out which selector on which component would be the right one. And on paper "Go through this massive block of html and check which property is out of place" should be the kind of use case where LLMs actually work. The stupid thing introduced two new different catastrophic failure modes where the entire browser crashed due to excessive rerenders before it found something that even remotely worked. And then I had to spend another hour stripping out unnecessary style properties it glued on while looking for a working solution. In the end, I probably would have been much faster doing it by hand.
I threw together a slop project to test something. It put in some JSON for something that didn't use that. I told it it was just some plain text. It took the JSON library out again. Then I added in something that does use JSON and it tried to make a basic JSON parsing library from scratch.
It's like a very junior programmer at times, with amnesia.
It does make some menial tasks simpler, but if people think it will actually replace us then they're in for a shock.
It does make some menial tasks simpler, but if people think it will actually replace us then they're in for a shock.
That's the sales pitch, we're in a job market drought right now. Give it a year or two and all the slop will begin breaking, making a new job market boom for developers
Would be kinda cool if we could get People Who Know What They're Doing(TM) to just...rebuild stuff from the ground up, untainted by slop. Haha a guy can dream.
Yea if you don't explicitly give it direction on how to keep the code maintainable, it will gladly just spew shit into the same file until you have 10K LOC in it.
To be fair I used to make entire features like this and then get R# to move the classes into separate files at the end. Guess I don’t like to organise too early, before the code has found it’s true form?
I'm unemployed, I'm incredibly snarky at the recruitment posts. (This literally hasn't changed in decades.) Right now I'm like "oh, they want Python programmers...? Good, I'm one. For web scraping tasks...? Okay that's bullshit. Wait, this is an AI job post? The MBAs, drunk with their Vibe Coding power, thought they could feed the Machine, but lo, they were mistaken!!! For web scraping was a Dark Art."
Me, a programmer, without any formal education, eating popcorn and reading the comments.
Just a little bit of impostor syndrome tonight boys, feelin' good otherwise :D
I think the pace of development is such that it's only a few years before humans are no longer in the chain of decision making. It was just 2017 when the infamous transformer paper came out.
"AI" in its current iteration is a distillation of human knowledge. It lowers the barrier to access to long standing programming libraries that make people think it is some sort of smart. It seems intelligent because it's imitating the things we have already created.
Yeah, that's what bothers me so much. It doesn't get "smarter" or imagine novel solutions. It simply has access to everything that's already existed.
I'm scared we're gonna have already experiencing some kind of intellectual slump because handing everything to the machine built on existing knowledge...doesn't yield any new ideas.
I'm sure they're still banking on human brains having new ideas, so they can simply steal them and feed those new ideas to the machine. Then they'll tell the ideator their brain is irrelevant thanks to the industrialized intellect-theft device.
The intellectual divide will be deepened significantly by "AI".
Ive never heard dumber conversations than people thinking "AI" is solving some hard problem. Here are a few examples:
It pulls text out of a pdf
It can read data out of a dwg
It can overlay data into a 3d model
It can update configuration data across lots of code
All of these could easily be done before, people were just too stupid to know how to do it without typing a stupid prompt and wasting resources to do it.
I wonder if this whole phenomenon could be explained by a Dunning-Kruger type effect. Where dumb people see "AI" as a great solution, and those on the smarter side see straight through it as a loud over juiced parrot.
Its more how unbelievably wasteful "AI" is to give dumbshits access to very basic tools. If and when it gets more efficient it will be viewed as we see search engines.
There was literally the dark version of Google to save energy on CRTs, and now it's energy consumption is low and normalized.
I thought the dark version of google was because the default colour was white instead of black and white was more energy intensive then white. Noting to so with the engine itself
Neurons are incapable of reasoning they're just firing based on a deterministic action potential. What are neural networks doing but creating internal models of reality and guessing what's next based on patterns?
I'm not saying they are identical but they are similar in the sense that a neuron cannot reason. It's only in a quite large and densly connected neural network we believe there is reasoning.
But the closest equivalent of a neuron in the AI world would be a node, and I haven't been talking about that. So your comparison does not fit or make sense.
LLMs as a genre of AI research are incapable of reasoning. At best they can pretend to reason, and even then they are terrible at it.
I think both can more aptly be represented as a special type of graph like from graph theory. Once again fundamentally the human brain isn't reasoning on the level of neurons and most definitely atoms aren't reasoning
We would've bullied those nerds more for misusing the word neuron. It was cute at the time, but now they're running around being all weird thinking that since they can pretend to read that one paper a better way to do one computer thing, it makes them experts in how brain works, just because there are similar words.
I don't think anyone who is aware enough is under the assumption that neural nets are a one to one replication of neurons. It's more of a special type of graph. That said one could also represent a human brain as a special type of graph.
The amount of good computer people specialised in ml, who think this knowledge gives them understanding of human mind that even neurobioligists don't posess is staggering. And depressing.
Also not really the point I was arguing. It's pretty clear NN are very different than a human brain. It does though give us some insight to minds more generally but I don't think current networks are on the order of complexity necessary to really be generating abstractions similar to a human neural network. That said there's strong arguments to be made about glimpses here and there like models spontaneously creating their own internal workspace like an inner monologue or quasi subconscious. To be clear I'm not saying it is aware or identical to a human mind but it's interesting to see it self assemlble similar looking structures without any direct guidance.
Worst people you know pretend they read a math paper from 10 years ago, and it gives them deep understanding of all the complex problems you can imagine. It's hard to overstate how much this one paper fried their brains. It's even harder to overstate how it's actually just one paper about computer math
The white paper on the fundamentals of the current AI push. Everything is for the most part based on that architecture from 2017 but with cleaver twist or two.
Mixed feelings because obviously studying for a degree implies maths and sciences which does qualify you as an engineer, but imo "software engineer" isn't a real thing. You're either a computer engineer or a code monkey.
I can tell you have a bachelor's of engineering. Not because I think you're being elitist. But because you haven't yet figured out that words are fluid and don't follow strict rules like systems do.
English is hard.
I have a B.E. as well. It took me years to word good.
You're on Lemmy so you'd be better off learning Mandarin or Russian.
Words which indicate a minimun amount of trained and proven competence or authority, such as Doctor or Police Lieutenant, are not things you can just claim willy nilly.
If I say the word Dr. Dre, do you know who I'm talking about? If the answer is yes, then you understand that the word doctor is not always about the medical profession.
Computer engineer. Software engineer. Train engineer. The qualifier is what let's you differentiate. Your claim is that the generic term only covers a subset of how people use the word.
IIRC you can't actually use the title "Engineer" prefixed or not without having a P.Eng license here in Canada. Of course, that didn't stop my previous American employers from giving me the title of Software Engineer but it's not supposed to be allowed
Yeah, I've looked it up and this is definitely the case, I've also had both Canadian and American employers refer to my position this way continuously with no repercussions (I similarly have an engineering degree in another field and was an eit and am now in software).
It's weird because if the provincial engineering societies were serious about enforcing their rules, it would take them ZERO effort to find thousands and thousands and thousands of violations through like a single LinkedIn search. The fact that they dont put in such a minimal amount of effort kind of signals they don't care about the rule.
Which is completely stupid, you can perform engineering without having paid the order and it doesn’t feel like there’s any other word that explains the job quite as easily.
Looking up synonyms though it seems I could legally call myself a “software mastermind”, “software plotter” or “software captain”.
I do agree partially but I also get wanting "engineer" to be a protected term. I think software design is probably one more valid uses of the term but I think applying it to everything ain't it (I.e. sanitation engineer).
Tbh I'm happy enough just having a Software Developer title
Yeah, I moved into software from electrical engineering. “Software engineers” are rarely doing engineering. Though, weirdly, the LLM-assisted coding methods seems to be leading to more of a focus on specs, design documents, and testing methodology, which almost makes it more like actual engineering.
"Software Engineer" is a title that is licensed by professional engineering organizations in Canada. Would you acknowledge that it's "a thing" in Canada?
Assuming the provincial or national government requires you to have such a license or be working under supervision of someone who does in order to be employed in the practice of making software, then yes.
The fact that it's licenced in one region but not another, and you rely on the licence in order to grant it the title of engineer, makes your base completely fallacious IMO. How can you step over a border and suddenly change your mind? Makes zero sense to me.
Do you understand what being a professional (in the formal sense) actually is? It means your first responsibility is to the public, not your employer, and you are legally responsible for the work that you do. That goes for doctors, lawyers, and yes, engineers.
If you as a civil engineer design an unsafe structure and it kills people, you can go to prison. If your employer demands you approve an unsafe design, the fact that you have to stamp the plans that get filed with the government gives you the power to resist. That's what being licensed means.
If people making software don't have that level of accountability -- again, to the public, not to their megalomaniacal tech bro boss -- then they ain't engineers.
It only varies by jurisdiction in the sense that some jurisdictions care about protecting the public and some apparently don't.
idk about grue but imo that depends on the requirements of the title. If you need to be a real engineer capable of doing real engineering work to claim it then by all means.
If you need less than 14 math credits and only general ed science requirements, then no.
CAEB accredites Canadian university programs, including civil engineering programs, electrical engineering programs, and yes, software engineering programs. In addition, provincial engineering organizations such as PEO require that all professiomal engineers are employed as engineers in training (EIT) for a period of time, have passed an ethics exam, and are in good professional standing.
TL;DR: yes, officially recognized software engineers are real engineers in Canada.
The other key requirements I hope your licensing has are continuing education requirements and, most importantly, the notion of being a professional and having accountability to the public, not just your employer. Just taking one college class where you learn about Therac-25 isn't enough; a professional software engineer also needs to have the power to refuse unethical demands by their employer (e.g. to build dark patterns or otherwise enshittify the software) and have that judgement be backed up by the state.
You can see the CEAB accredited programs and decide for yourself if they meet your personal criteria – they all seem to include a substantial variety of advanced mathematics.
I'm sensing that you may be an engineer in another discipline who feels jealous that the horde of unregulated software engineers are diluting your title. It's a valid concern in my opinion, and one that is shared by organizations like PEO who have and will take action on people using the term incorrectly, although their resources and jurisdiction are obviously limited. The key differentiation is between a licensed, professional software engineer with a stamp, and a software developer who was given "engineer" in their title at work.
During my computer engineering degree I was required to take enough math credits to earn a mathematics minor, and I learned the physics of transistors at a quantum level as part of the core curriculum. Do you think I can call myself an engineer, or should I limit it to just - what was the wording you used - oh yeah, syntax ape?
Do... Do you think software on its own needs no engineering?
If I say please build me a webshop from scratch, do I need a "computer engineer" which presumingly includes hardware knowledge by your distinction? Probably not. Is a code monkey going to build me the website? Also probably not.
So somewhere inbetween the two, you probably need a position that can engineer complex pieces of computer code, along with its design and architecture - we could even call it something short, like a software engineer or something
As a mechanical engineer: if a software engineer completed school, they're an engineer, deal with it. We're not talking about someone that doesn't know what they're doing cobbing things together for 1-off demos like Michael Reeves
From the videos I've seen, he just does trial and error - no math or understanding involved. That's not engineering - that's called design. Didn't stop him from bashing engineers in one of his videos saying that school was pointless. After that, I stopped watching his videos. Thankfully I only wasted time on 2-3 of them, including the swearing roomba.
Meanwhile I highly doubt he knows (or knew) anything about fatigue, trusses, or kinematics, things you have to have an understanding of in mechanical engineering. Maybe he learned after the fact, but I don't really care.
I only consider Engineering to be the application of math and science to plan complex systems or structures.
If a person is doing that as a programmer then they have to already understand computer architecture to a bare minimum of how memory works physically, processor functionality, and discreet mathematics: which makes them a computer engineer.
If a person completely lacks understanding of math or physics behind the machines they code for then I don't care how complicated their derivative work is: it is not engineering. Much like how painting is not engineering nor is balancing a stack of rocks.
Oh, boooo. Boooo! Come on, you were lining up a classic crowd favorite, the "Real Engineers understand the fundamentals" attack, then they hit you with the ol' "Some programming courses teach the fundamentals" and you come back with this? No pivot to credentialing, no tirade about how software is all virtual so it's not the same as building something with real materials, no grand declaration about how real engineers have to take their jobs seriously because lives are at stake? Just "no it's programming not engineering they're different"? Weak.
Back in my day we used to argue about whether or not software engineering is real engineering with some gumption.
I'm referring to the tropes of this tired-ass debate, I'm not saying there's any merit to any of them. My heckle is mainly concerned with the lack of substance, even cliched or overused substance, behind the argument you're trying to make. It sounds, based on the disrespectful way you describe coders as "syntax apes", that you don't really understand the craft of software development, the principles of engineering practice, or how the two intersect.
You sound like a clueless manager who thinks of devs as interchangeable and easily replaceable cogs in a software factory.
Engineering is the application of math and science to plan complex systems and structures
Computer science teaches math and science to plan complex systems and structures
But you believe that computer science prepares students for "programming", not engineering, so they aren't engineers. Despite it being about the application of math and science to design complex systems and structures (engineering) and despite the fact that everyone else calls this profession software engineering and you call it programming. And you don't think you have a bias?
It's possible to learn how to do some limited engineering while working towards a comp sci degree but it doesn't magically turn every task you perform into engineering. Programming isn't engineering.
So engineering is not what you said you believe it is, you actually believe it's what you said it is except software engineers because you're a condescending gatekeeper. Software engineering is different from programming.
What is it that you think I said it was? Because I pretty clearly outlined how memorizing syntax, calling functions, and gradeschool algebra are not engineering.
An old professor of mine made the half-joke that anything with 'science' in its name isn't really science. He was a computer science professor.
I suppose he meant that computer science is closer to applied science aka. engineering than 'real' science like maths and physics, and all their subcategories.
Anyway... In the end everyone that graduated studying computer science got a Bachelor/Masters degree of science, not engineering... And it doesn't matter anyway...
You're right, we should let people who know HTML print out their own degrees equivalent to a 6 year discipline with specific application of math and science. /sarcasm
TBH it's not easy to get 98 people to engage with a bottom of the list comment so clearly some part of it is botted, which tracks because I'm pissing off sloppers and slopper admins every time I visit this instance.
The default sorting is hot - which does not show your comment at the bottom of the list. It's not a conspiracy, you just said something incredibly naive about a field that is over represented on lemmy.
I'm a "software engineer." One of the most interesting jobs I've had was working on a team of (mostly) electrical engineers at an industrial tool manufacturer. Most of the team designed electronics (primarily IC's) for the controls. A few of us designed software that interacted with said controls.
That experience taught me that engjneering, at its core, is just solving problems in a given domain with a a specific set of "tools". I was amazed by how much thought process overlap there is between software and electronics engineering.
My job is solving business problems. Writing code is auxiliary to that. And even though I don't have have a degree or any certifications, none of the people on that team ever talked down to me or tried to make me feel inferior.
And even though I don't have have a degree or any certifications...
You must be really good! That's quite impressive, especially given how many jobs degree-gate just to filter applications so HR doesn't have to work too hard.
My job is solving business problems.
Sometimes I wish I got dopamine for solving business problems. I'd probably find myself in a lot more situations where people are willing to hand me money. XD
But yeah, software engineering is totally a thing. Like you said, it's just somebody (hopefully) carefully creating tools to solve particular problems.
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Not even. Your job isn’t to protect prod, it’s to take the blame when prod goes down.
If they expect you to write or go through 1000s of lines of code in a single day. your whole job isn't programming, is to be the scapegoat.
If I can't understand the code, and you can't explain, I'm not validating your pull request.
End of story.
Just ask ChatGPT to explain the code
It's great at that, had a colleague run a diff through Claude and it explained how the new code was better and how the optimizations worked. Then my colleague realised they'd run the diff the wrong way round, fed Claude the new diff and Claude happily explained how the new code was better and how the optimizations worked.
aint being the scapegoat exactly how you protect prod?
I am so fucking glad i pivoted to teaching. Now I run a Makerspace and teach young nerds creative problem solving. The pay is less but every day is a joy.
Remember that you are also collecting the responsibility of 10 and the pay of 1.
I'm realizing how over engineered Claude's solutions are. I have realized now just today that it's best at just dding tiny updates to code. Not good at architecting anything new at all that has to work for longer than 5 days.
I spent like an hour yesterday bullying Claude out of using a ResizeObserver, Refs and a useEffect construct just to fix the height of a container (there was a bug where the container didn't properly scale down in height because some weird hard-coded properties in an external component inside of it). I knew that it had to be solvable with just the right css selector, but I was lazy and didn't want to manually go through the html and figure out which selector on which component would be the right one. And on paper "Go through this massive block of html and check which property is out of place" should be the kind of use case where LLMs actually work. The stupid thing introduced two new different catastrophic failure modes where the entire browser crashed due to excessive rerenders before it found something that even remotely worked. And then I had to spend another hour stripping out unnecessary style properties it glued on while looking for a working solution. In the end, I probably would have been much faster doing it by hand.
I threw together a slop project to test something. It put in some JSON for something that didn't use that. I told it it was just some plain text. It took the JSON library out again. Then I added in something that does use JSON and it tried to make a basic JSON parsing library from scratch.
It's like a very junior programmer at times, with amnesia.
It does make some menial tasks simpler, but if people think it will actually replace us then they're in for a shock.
That's the sales pitch, we're in a job market drought right now. Give it a year or two and all the slop will begin breaking, making a new job market boom for developers
But honestly I don't want to spend my time fixing vibe coded stuff.
Would be kinda cool if we could get People Who Know What They're Doing(TM) to just...rebuild stuff from the ground up, untainted by slop. Haha a guy can dream.
yeah imagine that, hiring experts to excise their expertise...
what silly thought pained laughter
Yea if you don't explicitly give it direction on how to keep the code maintainable, it will gladly just spew shit into the same file until you have 10K LOC in it.
Thanks for the tips /s
To be fair I used to make entire features like this and then get R# to move the classes into separate files at the end. Guess I don’t like to organise too early, before the code has found it’s true form?
I'm unemployed, I'm incredibly snarky at the recruitment posts. (This literally hasn't changed in decades.) Right now I'm like "oh, they want Python programmers...? Good, I'm one. For web scraping tasks...? Okay that's bullshit. Wait, this is an AI job post? The MBAs, drunk with their Vibe Coding power, thought they could feed the Machine, but lo, they were mistaken!!! For web scraping was a Dark Art."
Me, a programmer, without any formal education, eating popcorn and reading the comments.
Just a little bit of impostor syndrome tonight boys, feelin' good otherwise :D
don't be the condom. be defective.
look whos the monkey on a type writer now :D
The whoop band confirms it
Also called a reverse centaur.
Shift + Tab + Fuck it.
I think the pace of development is such that it's only a few years before humans are no longer in the chain of decision making. It was just 2017 when the infamous transformer paper came out.
A stupid person would believe this.
"AI" in its current iteration is a distillation of human knowledge. It lowers the barrier to access to long standing programming libraries that make people think it is some sort of smart. It seems intelligent because it's imitating the things we have already created.
Yeah, that's what bothers me so much. It doesn't get "smarter" or imagine novel solutions. It simply has access to everything that's already existed.
I'm scared we're
gonna havealready experiencing some kind of intellectual slump because handing everything to the machine built on existing knowledge...doesn't yield any new ideas.I'm sure they're still banking on human brains having new ideas, so they can simply steal them and feed those new ideas to the machine. Then they'll tell the ideator their brain is irrelevant thanks to the industrialized intellect-theft device.
The intellectual divide will be deepened significantly by "AI".
Ive never heard dumber conversations than people thinking "AI" is solving some hard problem. Here are a few examples:
All of these could easily be done before, people were just too stupid to know how to do it without typing a stupid prompt and wasting resources to do it.
I wonder if this whole phenomenon could be explained by a Dunning-Kruger type effect. Where dumb people see "AI" as a great solution, and those on the smarter side see straight through it as a loud over juiced parrot.
No need to wonder. You are spot on.
dont you think thats exactly what most people want? they dont want to create next Linux :(
Its more how unbelievably wasteful "AI" is to give dumbshits access to very basic tools. If and when it gets more efficient it will be viewed as we see search engines.
There was literally the dark version of Google to save energy on CRTs, and now it's energy consumption is low and normalized.
I thought the dark version of google was because the default colour was white instead of black and white was more energy intensive then white. Noting to so with the engine itself
LLMs are incapable of reasoning. They just guess the next token.
Neurons are incapable of reasoning they're just firing based on a deterministic action potential. What are neural networks doing but creating internal models of reality and guessing what's next based on patterns?
LLMs do not fit as neurons in your comparison.
Brains can reason, LLMs cannot.
I'm not saying they are identical but they are similar in the sense that a neuron cannot reason. It's only in a quite large and densly connected neural network we believe there is reasoning.
But the closest equivalent of a neuron in the AI world would be a node, and I haven't been talking about that. So your comparison does not fit or make sense.
LLMs as a genre of AI research are incapable of reasoning. At best they can pretend to reason, and even then they are terrible at it.
I think both can more aptly be represented as a special type of graph like from graph theory. Once again fundamentally the human brain isn't reasoning on the level of neurons and most definitely atoms aren't reasoning
Once again that's a strawman.
We would've bullied those nerds more for misusing the word neuron. It was cute at the time, but now they're running around being all weird thinking that since they can pretend to read that one paper a better way to do one computer thing, it makes them experts in how brain works, just because there are similar words.
I don't think anyone who is aware enough is under the assumption that neural nets are a one to one replication of neurons. It's more of a special type of graph. That said one could also represent a human brain as a special type of graph.
The amount of good computer people specialised in ml, who think this knowledge gives them understanding of human mind that even neurobioligists don't posess is staggering. And depressing.
Also not really the point I was arguing. It's pretty clear NN are very different than a human brain. It does though give us some insight to minds more generally but I don't think current networks are on the order of complexity necessary to really be generating abstractions similar to a human neural network. That said there's strong arguments to be made about glimpses here and there like models spontaneously creating their own internal workspace like an inner monologue or quasi subconscious. To be clear I'm not saying it is aware or identical to a human mind but it's interesting to see it self assemlble similar looking structures without any direct guidance.
What is the transformer paper
Worst people you know pretend they read a math paper from 10 years ago, and it gives them deep understanding of all the complex problems you can imagine. It's hard to overstate how much this one paper fried their brains. It's even harder to overstate how it's actually just one paper about computer math
Just googled it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need
The white paper on the fundamentals of the current AI push. Everything is for the most part based on that architecture from 2017 but with cleaver twist or two.
Mixed feelings because obviously studying for a degree implies maths and sciences which does qualify you as an engineer, but imo "software engineer" isn't a real thing. You're either a computer engineer or a code monkey.
Your opinion is bad then. And I realize the irony of saying that with my username.
maybe on krypton code monkeys are licensed and everyone else is just doing engineering
I can tell you have a bachelor's of engineering. Not because I think you're being elitist. But because you haven't yet figured out that words are fluid and don't follow strict rules like systems do.
English is hard.
I have a B.E. as well. It took me years to word good.
You're on Lemmy so you'd be better off learning Mandarin or Russian.
Words which indicate a minimun amount of trained and proven competence or authority, such as Doctor or Police Lieutenant, are not things you can just claim willy nilly.
Dude, an Engineer drives a fucking train
I can respect that but you need to propose a new term for structural and electrical engineers to replace it if that's where we draw the line.
You're continuing to prove my point. Words can have multiple meanings. Words change over time. The definition of a word is whatever people use it as.
If tomorrow every bus driver becomes a transportation engineer, and everyone starts calling them that, then that's what engineer means.
If you cannot accept the above, you cannot properly participate in English.
Ah dangit, ok mr gatekeeper here take my license to English
If I say the word Dr. Dre, do you know who I'm talking about? If the answer is yes, then you understand that the word doctor is not always about the medical profession.
He doesn't call himself medical doctor dre or physician dre though
My doctorate of English doesn't imply that either. Still have a doctorate. Still a doctor.
Okay go down to the hospital and tell everyone you're a medical doctor. I want to see how far you make it.
"Medical" doctor. You've moved the goal posts.
Computer engineer. Software engineer. Train engineer. The qualifier is what let's you differentiate. Your claim is that the generic term only covers a subset of how people use the word.
"Software engineer" will be a thing when it's licensed by the state. Until then, we're all just glorified cowboy-coders with no accountability.
(Speaking as computer programmer with an EIT in a different field.)
IIRC you can't actually use the title "Engineer" prefixed or not without having a P.Eng license here in Canada. Of course, that didn't stop my previous American employers from giving me the title of Software Engineer but it's not supposed to be allowed
Yeah, I've looked it up and this is definitely the case, I've also had both Canadian and American employers refer to my position this way continuously with no repercussions (I similarly have an engineering degree in another field and was an eit and am now in software).
It's weird because if the provincial engineering societies were serious about enforcing their rules, it would take them ZERO effort to find thousands and thousands and thousands of violations through like a single LinkedIn search. The fact that they dont put in such a minimal amount of effort kind of signals they don't care about the rule.
Which is completely stupid, you can perform engineering without having paid the order and it doesn’t feel like there’s any other word that explains the job quite as easily.
Looking up synonyms though it seems I could legally call myself a “software mastermind”, “software plotter” or “software captain”.
I do agree partially but I also get wanting "engineer" to be a protected term. I think software design is probably one more valid uses of the term but I think applying it to everything ain't it (I.e. sanitation engineer).
Tbh I'm happy enough just having a Software Developer title
I mean it’s fine, but development is only one part of engineering, which is why I don’t like the term.
That's fair... lately I've been more of a Kubernetes configurator than a developer so I get you
Yeah, I moved into software from electrical engineering. “Software engineers” are rarely doing engineering. Though, weirdly, the LLM-assisted coding methods seems to be leading to more of a focus on specs, design documents, and testing methodology, which almost makes it more like actual engineering.
"Software Engineer" is a title that is licensed by professional engineering organizations in Canada. Would you acknowledge that it's "a thing" in Canada?
Assuming the provincial or national government requires you to have such a license or be working under supervision of someone who does in order to be employed in the practice of making software, then yes.
The fact that it's licenced in one region but not another, and you rely on the licence in order to grant it the title of engineer, makes your base completely fallacious IMO. How can you step over a border and suddenly change your mind? Makes zero sense to me.
Do you understand what being a professional (in the formal sense) actually is? It means your first responsibility is to the public, not your employer, and you are legally responsible for the work that you do. That goes for doctors, lawyers, and yes, engineers.
If you as a civil engineer design an unsafe structure and it kills people, you can go to prison. If your employer demands you approve an unsafe design, the fact that you have to stamp the plans that get filed with the government gives you the power to resist. That's what being licensed means.
If people making software don't have that level of accountability -- again, to the public, not to their megalomaniacal tech bro boss -- then they ain't engineers.
It only varies by jurisdiction in the sense that some jurisdictions care about protecting the public and some apparently don't.
That's not the law in every country as far as I understand, so this simply comes down to a matter of definition.
Case closed as far as I'm concerned. I'm quite satisfied with that.
idk about grue but imo that depends on the requirements of the title. If you need to be a real engineer capable of doing real engineering work to claim it then by all means.
If you need less than 14 math credits and only general ed science requirements, then no.
CAEB accredites Canadian university programs, including civil engineering programs, electrical engineering programs, and yes, software engineering programs. In addition, provincial engineering organizations such as PEO require that all professiomal engineers are employed as engineers in training (EIT) for a period of time, have passed an ethics exam, and are in good professional standing.
TL;DR: yes, officially recognized software engineers are real engineers in Canada.
The other key requirements I hope your licensing has are continuing education requirements and, most importantly, the notion of being a professional and having accountability to the public, not just your employer. Just taking one college class where you learn about Therac-25 isn't enough; a professional software engineer also needs to have the power to refuse unethical demands by their employer (e.g. to build dark patterns or otherwise enshittify the software) and have that judgement be backed up by the state.
Alright but it feels like you didn't really touch on my personal requirements and just appealed to authority.
Feels like the right thing to do, IMO. Why do your personal requirements matter anywhere regarding this? 😆
Progress comes from the voicing of opinions.
You can see the CEAB accredited programs and decide for yourself if they meet your personal criteria – they all seem to include a substantial variety of advanced mathematics.
I'm sensing that you may be an engineer in another discipline who feels jealous that the horde of unregulated software engineers are diluting your title. It's a valid concern in my opinion, and one that is shared by organizations like PEO who have and will take action on people using the term incorrectly, although their resources and jurisdiction are obviously limited. The key differentiation is between a licensed, professional software engineer with a stamp, and a software developer who was given "engineer" in their title at work.
You seemed more familiar with them so I wanted to hear your input but apparently you know as little about them as I do.
During my computer engineering degree I was required to take enough math credits to earn a mathematics minor, and I learned the physics of transistors at a quantum level as part of the core curriculum. Do you think I can call myself an engineer, or should I limit it to just - what was the wording you used - oh yeah, syntax ape?
Do... Do you think software on its own needs no engineering?
If I say please build me a webshop from scratch, do I need a "computer engineer" which presumingly includes hardware knowledge by your distinction? Probably not. Is a code monkey going to build me the website? Also probably not.
So somewhere inbetween the two, you probably need a position that can engineer complex pieces of computer code, along with its design and architecture - we could even call it something short, like a software engineer or something
Programmer
A programmer builds the software. An engineer designs it.
Lmao ok pal
That explains why all the programmers carry around hammers. You know. To help them type in the word CMake.
I'm not sure what you mean about hammers, but I mean build as in implementation, not build as in compile.
This guy is just lost. Everybody knows engineers drive trains.
As a mechanical engineer: if a software engineer completed school, they're an engineer, deal with it. We're not talking about someone that doesn't know what they're doing cobbing things together for 1-off demos like Michael Reeves
Random insult to a guy that does entertainment quite well. Am I reading too much into it or are you randomly extra pissed?
From the videos I've seen, he just does trial and error - no math or understanding involved. That's not engineering - that's called design. Didn't stop him from bashing engineers in one of his videos saying that school was pointless. After that, I stopped watching his videos. Thankfully I only wasted time on 2-3 of them, including the swearing roomba.
Meanwhile I highly doubt he knows (or knew) anything about fatigue, trusses, or kinematics, things you have to have an understanding of in mechanical engineering. Maybe he learned after the fact, but I don't really care.
You are not the target. And the says a lot of random shit just to flame imo.
I enjoy his videos because they are funny, not to learn any engineering skill
So you admit he's an asshole. Why should anyone waste their time on his videos then?
It's not a real thing because it's virtual? Or not being regulated makes it not a real thing?
I only consider Engineering to be the application of math and science to plan complex systems or structures.
If a person is doing that as a programmer then they have to already understand computer architecture to a bare minimum of how memory works physically, processor functionality, and discreet mathematics: which makes them a computer engineer.
If a person completely lacks understanding of math or physics behind the machines they code for then I don't care how complicated their derivative work is: it is not engineering. Much like how painting is not engineering nor is balancing a stack of rocks.
any computer science course teaches those things
To prepare the student for programming not for engineering.
Oh, boooo. Boooo! Come on, you were lining up a classic crowd favorite, the "Real Engineers understand the fundamentals" attack, then they hit you with the ol' "Some programming courses teach the fundamentals" and you come back with this? No pivot to credentialing, no tirade about how software is all virtual so it's not the same as building something with real materials, no grand declaration about how real engineers have to take their jobs seriously because lives are at stake? Just "no it's programming not engineering they're different"? Weak.
Back in my day we used to argue about whether or not software engineering is real engineering with some gumption.
Engineers are rarely menial labourers so idk what you mean by programming being virtual. Like 98% of engineering work is planning diagrams.
My argument has always been that the work is different between a syntax ape and an engineer.
I'm referring to the tropes of this tired-ass debate, I'm not saying there's any merit to any of them. My heckle is mainly concerned with the lack of substance, even cliched or overused substance, behind the argument you're trying to make. It sounds, based on the disrespectful way you describe coders as "syntax apes", that you don't really understand the craft of software development, the principles of engineering practice, or how the two intersect.
You sound like a clueless manager who thinks of devs as interchangeable and easily replaceable cogs in a software factory.
So you believe that
But you believe that computer science prepares students for "programming", not engineering, so they aren't engineers. Despite it being about the application of math and science to design complex systems and structures (engineering) and despite the fact that everyone else calls this profession software engineering and you call it programming. And you don't think you have a bias?
It's possible to learn how to do some limited engineering while working towards a comp sci degree but it doesn't magically turn every task you perform into engineering. Programming isn't engineering.
So engineering is not what you said you believe it is, you actually believe it's what you said it is except software engineers because you're a condescending gatekeeper. Software engineering is different from programming.
What is it that you think I said it was? Because I pretty clearly outlined how memorizing syntax, calling functions, and gradeschool algebra are not engineering.
We don't get computer science degrees from gradeschool, goober.
An old professor of mine made the half-joke that anything with 'science' in its name isn't really science. He was a computer science professor.
I suppose he meant that computer science is closer to applied science aka. engineering than 'real' science like maths and physics, and all their subcategories.
Anyway... In the end everyone that graduated studying computer science got a Bachelor/Masters degree of science, not engineering... And it doesn't matter anyway...
You're right, we should let people who know HTML print out their own degrees equivalent to a 6 year discipline with specific application of math and science. /sarcasm
It matters.
You should post this to UnpopularOpinions.
TBH it's not easy to get 98 people to engage with a bottom of the list comment so clearly some part of it is botted, which tracks because I'm pissing off sloppers and slopper admins every time I visit this instance.
The default sorting is hot - which does not show your comment at the bottom of the list. It's not a conspiracy, you just said something incredibly naive about a field that is over represented on lemmy.
I'm not on Lemmy. Lemmy is maintained by people who deny trans rights and fight for Russia.
Gosh, did I say you were?
yes
Where?
I'm a "software engineer." One of the most interesting jobs I've had was working on a team of (mostly) electrical engineers at an industrial tool manufacturer. Most of the team designed electronics (primarily IC's) for the controls. A few of us designed software that interacted with said controls.
That experience taught me that engjneering, at its core, is just solving problems in a given domain with a a specific set of "tools". I was amazed by how much thought process overlap there is between software and electronics engineering.
My job is solving business problems. Writing code is auxiliary to that. And even though I don't have have a degree or any certifications, none of the people on that team ever talked down to me or tried to make me feel inferior.
You must be really good! That's quite impressive, especially given how many jobs degree-gate just to filter applications so HR doesn't have to work
too hard.Sometimes I wish I got dopamine for solving business problems. I'd probably find myself in a lot more situations where people are willing to hand me money. XD
But yeah, software engineering is totally a thing. Like you said, it's just somebody (hopefully) carefully creating tools to solve particular problems.
I'm assuming you've never experienced the world of safety critical software development like the medical and aerospace industries.
An engineer can code but a programmer is not an engineer. I have actually, btw, though not as a programmer but closely with them.
This is very much a US specific thing
I get your point but I'm not going to pull out my whole resume when, at the end of the day, I write software for a living.
Programmer is shorter and more honest than software engineer, tho
True. It doesn't include my (legally recognised) title, however
Programmers and Software Engineers are different things, tho
Programmers and Engineers are different things, tho
Yes. But software engineers are engineers. Not all programmers are software engineers.
Not all software engineers are engineers and furthermore software isn't an engineering discipline to begin with.
Wut bud
Oh shit, today I learned that software can't be a complex system. That makes our jobs easier. I'll be sure to tell IEEE.
i think the word "engineer" has something to do with the word "ingenuity" ... now ask yourself, how much creative thinking do you need as a coder?
Lots. It's the entire craft, what do you even mean? The whole thing is creative thinking.
Depends on the task, somewhere between next to none and actual engineering.
Wait, are you a Someordinarygamer fan?
no