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Discussion on: Are You a Developer or Engineer? Why?

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HS

Another angle: There's no such thing as a "web engineer" or "software engineer" for that matter. Studying computer science may make you some sort of scientist or engineer as in making new algorithms like better hash maps or such where you actually have to apply mathematics, and electrical engineer is based upon actual science (physics and mathematics) so you're actually an engineer by using scientific methods.

Software development has no science applied to it - the ones we're mostly doing, and TDD, patterns and all that are opinions of some people on how to make better code but have NO background in mathematics or other science. So using this or that pattern is design issue and copy pasting stuff while changing code a bit to work, writing many tests is belief base on that someone knew how to write good code, using X,Y,Z tool/language like a master is like working in construction business hammering a nail because you had a JIRA task telling you to do so and calling yourself civil engineer.

Now developing embedded software which controls some specialised hardware for let's say airplane or such might be engineering as you then need to know stuff about physics to actually implement solution but there's a shortcut of knowing the language and having people give you formulas or whatever.

Jim Coplien, a little bit nervous guy, had a good point about this. Now he might be a bit too much for some people but I agree to some extent with him.