This is funny because the same exact joke could be made about software engineers due to them not having a professional certification like electrical, civil, etc.
this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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That's where I thought the joke was going when I first read it.
There is PE licensing for software engineers though?
As of 2013 I believe, but it was discontinued in 2019. Fairly rare to see in the wild outside of specific domains like medical device coding or other areas where failure isn't acceptable.
what’s a bootcamp engineer?
I think it's a joke for the people who pay into those 6-month software engineering bootcamps.
Ehh, if someone can make more than me by doing a 6 month course, I say good for them.
Sure, I'm likely to have a deeper understanding with my 4 year degree, but like... the more that person gets paid, the easier it is for me to negotiate my own salary.
I'll never call for anyone to have their wage cut just to make myself feel smug. I see this all the time in the minimum wage "debate," and it drives me nuts.
I'm definitely not agreeing with the joke either, I find it confusing at best because someone who finished a boot camp and got a job as a software engineer is still a software engineer.
IMO education plays a smaller role in software development proficiency than aptitude does. But I'm biased, I'm self taught - no boot camp nor college.
Ahh, I didn't mean to imply you agreed, was just tacking on.
I completely agree. I'm glad I got my education, but in my day-to-day work I rarely do anything that couldn't be done by a motivated and self-taught coder (and even then, who knows).
That said, my job right now is pretty standard coding, I'm not like, designing CPU chips or anything like that, where the "science" part of computer science is a lot more relevant.
I figured, but wanted to clarify in case others saw it that way 😅.
I assume the thing a degree usually covers that a self taught lacks is accepted best practices, teamwork, and alot of principles that are better learned before diving into it. So a lot of bad habits to unlearn.
IMO, in today's information world a degree isn't necessary for learning, only as proof of learning (which is still very relevant). But a formal education also puts the tools you need to practice in front of you. Software development is an easy field to learn and prove your skills in. Chip design you'd definitely be better off getting a formal education, though you still see people making microcontrollers in games like Minecraft without formal education.
Imo the main thing my education provided was that it forced me to learn the "boring" stuff that I might not have bothered to learn otherwise - especially not if I was focused on learning practical skills to land a job. Things like approximation algorithms, Haskell, all sorts of math, etcetc. Things that I will likely never use directly, but that inform my decisions just by being aware of it.
It also helps a bit with imposter syndrome to have that piece of paper, at least for me.
Neither of these are what I would call strictly necessary, though, for sure.
The fact that most universities will graduate CS majors without ever teaching them how to use a debugger, build system, or version control system shows how useful they are to actual engineering work.
The problem isn't the CS curriculum, it's people getting a CS degree when what they (and employers) want is some kind of Software Engineering degree.
Computer Science teaches the foundational math and science of computation, and in that respect I found it to be very useful and informative. I don't really need to know how to use Visual Studio to prove the limit of K for some algorithm.
Besides, there are so many tools out there that we might as well just learn them on the job anyway.
I had recent cs grads in my bootcamp with me.
I did a free 6 month boot camp and I just landed a senior role after 5 years.
In my experience, the type to get mad are the ones who actually have degrees.
IMO the ones with the degree and the aptitude are fine. It's the ones who struggle despite spending the time who are probably unhappy.
Don't let him in the club.
Undersigned, Prompt Engineer.
I'm not against bootcamps, but there are so many caveats.
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Most bootcamp instructors have no business teaching. They have no qualifications for it, and rarely have the experience to teach the subject matter.
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Many bootcamps are owned by agencies or companies looking for cheap labour, with many making false promises on employment - because they give them a temporary contract to get cheap devs. It was painful to see so many bootcamp grads last year, entering an empty market.
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They are often very expensive, to the point where I've worked with people woefully unqualified, who put up with so much shit because they're in debt. They were promised a career, only to be taught just enough to do basic tasks in React, and then being limited in what they can do.
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You end up with a horrendous amount of imposter syndrome, in an industry where people already feel like frauds.
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I'm in the UK, and you wouldn't believe how many people go to bootcamps and assume we're all making £100k salaries. Hell, where I live, I regularly get roles for senior engineers that are £40k a year. A woman I used to work with gave up her £30k a year job to be a front-end developer for £20k, with zero benefits, no union, etc.
My bootcamp had pretty great instructors, but also a focus on learning how to teach yourself. It was a bit longer than some because it was full stack. I think it's like university, you get out what you put in. Some folks got nothing from it, I did great. Got my first job for 70k the same week I left. 5 years later I'm making over 160k.
Computer science is not engineering. Neither is software engineering.
CS isn't, but software engineering takes strict approaches to design and development for safety critical systems. I'm not talking about finance applications however.
I'm talking about like flight control computers, valve assist device controllers, medical lab automation and notification systems, weapon platform communication systems.
You do have stamping engineers for telecom design. As far as I know that's the only real engineering title from the perspective that the sign off of the work carries well defined legal liability. I was director of engineering for a large org and the only stamping engineers in the org were telecom designers, not the security, software, systems, cloud, network, etc folks. Nothing against then either, but historically engineer meant something very specific prior to the rise of information technology.
Edit: actually in 2013 NCEES added a PE cert for software engineering, but it was discontinued on 2019.
DO-178 requires signatures for sign off that carry a liability risk to the software engineers.
That’s for an FAA certified flight system.
Good example. There's some domains that do carry some liability and weight to the title. Flight systems, medical devices, etc. Domains where failure can kill people and can't easily be rectified.
As a software engineer I'm inclined to agree
Bootcamp® -> Audio Engineer, perhaps?
Maybe for those audio engineerings who end up on the mastering side of things but those who go down the live sound systems engineer path definitely deserves the same level of respect as any other engineering profession.
Professional engineering is really about implementing processes and procedures that create reliable and dependable systems. Ultimately it's about responsibility and risk management. Being an engineer has nothing to do with understanding or implementing technology or technical details and specifications (unless you are in an extremely junior level engineering position). That work already has another title: that's called being a technologist (and there ain't nothing wrong with that title and that work).
Very, very, very few technologists (including self-taught programmers, computer scientists, and even some engineering grads) have, or even understand the skills needed to manage technical risk, simply because those skills are not part of any of those curriculums and the licensure required to be recognized to conduct those activities. It requires knowledge, training, and certification specifically, not just a university degree or x years on the job. Of course, it's not the sort of distinction that the general public understands by "engineering" since the public kind of just takes the act of technical risk management for granted.
Conversely, it's perhaps also why the number of engineers with hands-on skills is shockingly lower than we expect: using technology is not on the engineering curriculum.
But yeah, just because the general public confuses technical skills with engineering doesn't give you, lacking all three of : an accredited engineering degree, an engineering licence, and perhaps most importantly, malpractice insurance, licence to call yourself an engineer.
What are you talking about? I am pretty confused by your entire perspective How is using technology not in the engineering curriculum? Building robots and programming was at least half of my degree. And risk management is a very, very, small part of it, just a couple factors you add to some calculations basically.
engineer UK /ˌen.dʒɪˈnɪər/ US /ˌen.dʒɪˈnɪr/
a person whose job is to design or build machines, engines, or electrical equipment, or things such as roads, railways, or bridges, using scientific principles:
a civil engineer
a mechanical/structural engineer
a software engineer
I'm all for letting people ramble, but Engineering is, by definition, the design of tecnical stuff.
Risk management is a part of "designing things", but it is not what makes you an engineer. Converting technology into objects that solve problems is what makes you an engineer.
And there are lots of disciplines out there that started calling themselves engineers while they are objectively very deep into the grey area. If your work does not involve calculus, logic or physics of some kind, it is highly likely that you are not in fact a real engineer. (Looking at you, Sales and Marketing Engineers)
Yeah people give us industrial engineers shit, but if you watch us talk with business people you’ll see how wide the gulf is between us.
Also “sales and marketing engineer” jobs are the bane of looking for a job with an engineering degree. Like I get that you think you want an engineer to sell technical products to other engineers, and yeah I’d rather buy technical products from someone who thinks like an engineer, but also fuck you I didn’t break my brain in school to be in sales, I did it so I could get paid to design shit.
A trend I've noticed over the years is that there are just very little jobs available where you "design shit". It feels like the market is saturated with designers and companies already have all the workers they are looking for.
Meanwhile most people I've seen graduate have no real talent for the job. And they never seem to get hired for positions that require talent in design for manufacturing.
You'd think there would be more jobs available, but there simply aren't. All the jobs are either trade skills, pure CAD or some other part of the product lifecycle that doesn't require any real design skill.
You aren’t wrong, though even in manufacturing roles we still do design shit, it’s just more often shit like a workstation setup than a product.
Because they are referring to engineering disciplines that predate all of the stuff you mention. When mechanical, structural, civic, etc engineers sign off on a design (stamp it) the incur personal liability if there is a defect in the design that kills someone or causes damage. There are certifications for telecom design and processes that require them to stamp designs, but otherwise most of what is lumped together as technology doesn't constitute engineering from a legal or historical perspective. However the titles sort of took off and created two sets of meanings.
If software engineering was treated as engineering in the way that mechanical or others forms are, you would get a degree, get an entry level job at a firm as a junior, and after a few years, study and get certified to stamp designs/code systems, etc.
Now, outside of places like code for flight systems, medical devices, power plants, etc there isn't a need for that kind of rigor, but those are the areas that would require licensing if it was available.
Oh okay now I get it, thanks
Not following this one. Are we talking about dual booting or is this some military thing that I’m too non-combatant to understand?
It’s making fun of people that go to coding bootcamps
That would be a combat engineer
Neither. Software engineer are not true engineers in a sense that they don't require a certification. So it's just a title. Most boot camps are for full stack, but I guess some are software engineer boot camps. That or the fact that they get a job as such title with only a boot camp.
Of course you're an engineer. I could tell you didn't have to take gen ed courses from the punctuation mistake.
The boot camp morons usually don't make it past six months in my experience