This thread on Hacker News terrifies me

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, September 1, 2018 2:19:07 AM MDT Kagamin via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> On Friday, 31 August 2018 at 21:09:21 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >> Some countries do have engineering certifications and
> >> professional permits for software engineering, but its still a
> >> minority.
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > It's precisely for this reason that the title "software
> > engineer" makes me cringe on the one hand, and snicker on the
> > other hand.  I honestly cannot keep a straight face when using
> > the word "engineering" to describe what a typical programmer
> > does in the industry these days.
>
> Huh? I'm pretty sure they mean it was a management decision. Why
> do you blame engineers for doing what they are asked to do?
> Making them write code properly is as simple as paying for
> exactly that.

I think that his point was more that it's sometimes argued that software
engineering really isn't engineering in the classical sense. If you're
talking about someone like a civil engineer for instance, the engineer
applies well-known and established principles to everything they do in a
disciplined way. The engineering aspects of civil engineering aren't
subjective at all. They're completely based in the physical sciences.
Software engineering on the other hand isn't based on the physical sciences
at all, and there really isn't general agreement on what good software
engineering principles are. There are aspects of it that are very much like
engineering and others that are very much subjective.

Someone else could probably explain it better than I could, but based on
some definitions of engineering, software engineering definitely doesn't
count, but it _does_ have aspects of engineering, so it can be argued either
way. Wikipedia even has a "controversy" section on its page for software
engineering that talks briefly about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering

I'm not sure that I really agree that software engineering isn't
engineering, but the folks who argue against it do have a point in that
software engineering is definitely not like most other engineering
disciplines, and good engineering practices are nowhere near as well-defined
in software engineering as those in other engineering fields.

Issues with management cause other problems on top of all of that, but even
if you have a group of software engineers doing their absolute best to
follow good software engineering principles without any kind of management
interference, what they're doing is still very different from most
engineering disciplines, and it likely wouldn't be hard for another group of
competent software engineers to make solid arguments about why the good
software engineering practices that they're following actually aren't all
that good.

- Jonathan M Davis