Do you think the term software engineer is overused?

Question

Do you think the term software engineer is overused? I know many people who are programmers but I would not consider them software engineers since they do not architect anything and use strictly software to program. I personally feel that software engineers create software for specialized hardware and have to understand hardware to do so.

I work as an embedded software engineer and find that other "software engineers" will simply create GUI's or program against SQL Server and use .NET. Do you think software engineers is overused or maybe even shouldn't be an "engineer" at all? (Again, I personally think they are engineers when they create against specific hardware and interact with mechanical and electrical engineers and know a lot about their stuff also).

Answer 1

I think is it overused. Anyone now a days who designs something calls themselves engineers. It bothers me b/c all the hardship and work I had to go through to get the degree and the work Im doing to become a P.E. is not being seen with the respect it should. I just ignore programmers who think that their work is of engineering.

Answer 2

I'm basically a hardware guy but have worked with many programmers along the way and we've crawled through hardware and software debug together. Most of these guys would spend a lot of time up front thinking about the structure of their code and optimizing what they finally wrote and were proud of their work. They were software engine rs and in fact craftsman. At the same same time, we've had to write device drivers to interface to the popular operating system and once in a while we'd get pieces of their source code. My cat could have done better. They were hackers. They had blocks of code still in the source that they simply branched around and there was no optimization. It seems like they simply wanted to get it to work and if it was inefficient, they didn't care. These guys were definitely not software engineers.

Answer 3

I agree, I am one of those .Net programmers and it's a shame how the vast majority of us do not know how to optimize, how to profile, how to use data structures, how to design properly, etc....

The vast majority of business apps I've worked on are shoddily built consisting of endless spaghetti code that lacks documentation and code comments. It makes me sad, I want to get more towards the computer science aspect of things.

Programmers like that should be called "business programmers", because they do not follow engineering disciplines.

Answer 4

Yes, and I also think the term engineer is overused as well.