Hillel Wayne did a good "study" on this by speaking to a bunch of engineers who moved into software, engineers who stayed in software, and engineers who only worked in software (yes, you can be a chartered engineer in most Western countries including the US and UK purely from software).

The strong consensus was that software is an engineering discipline, and the nitpicking you can have on any particular topic that is/isn't engineering-y can be applied across the board.

But this conversation is totally moot IMO because if you have a bachelors in computer science or software engineering, and a masters in the same discipline, and several years experience, you can apply and become the same chartered engineer from the same association that does "real" engineering.

> The strong consensus was that software is an engineering discipline

I see it as a difference in time and stakes.

We’ve built bridges and boats for thousands of years, where the outcome of failure is people die.

This has a lot to do with why it’s easy to estimate the time and cost to build a house, but it’s a rare shaman who can consistently estimate software projects well.

Once we’ve built software for even a few hundred years, we’ll probably have it pretty dialed in, too.

> We’ve built bridges and boats for thousands of years, where the outcome of failure is people die.

We write software that has killed people due to bugs too, such as Therac-25 releasing too much beta radiation killing patients.

> This has a lot to do with why it’s easy to estimate the time and cost to build a house

My parents and in-laws are property developers and I've also been involved in a build; not one was on time or budget. Some are really off budget, beyond the scale software projects that mess up are. In China they've had projects run into the billions and be decades late.

I do understand your points, but this is what I mean when I say you can nitpick any issue with software not being Real Engineering and apply it to other engineering categories too.

But yeah we may have a very different process in 50 or 100 years. I'm only 10 years into my career and it's already pretty different to when I started!

>I lol at people who say there is any Engineering in software.

There definitely is. Safety/mission critical code is definately a more rigorous, formal process where you don't just download a library for padding a string (you probably wouldn't use built-in strings anyway on this kind of code).

But I agree that the way most coding works (i.e. move fast and fail often) is completely antithetical to how engineers should work. But there's infinite moneys and almost zero accountability, so who's gonna stop them?

>Knowing to optimize for time by using vectors is more of an art, than a science.

that's definitely why I fully agree with calling programmers creatives over engineers. once you get past dead simple problems, no two programmers are going to approach a prompt the exact same way. performance, scalabiliy, documenting, version control friendliness, even ephemeral stuff like code style. coders very much are artists who happen to know a lot of math.

As someone who started going to school for Mechanical Engineering and ended up in Comp Sci, I think your last paragraph is what drew me in. So many different ways to solve the problem at hand.

> Coming from Real Engineering

One related problem I see is that Computer Science tends to be under-estimated by other engineering fields. A ton of software engineers did not study software. They learned to program as part of their engineering studies, and they believe that they learned both Computer Science and their engineering topic at the same time.

I may be biased, but I see fewer computer scientists pretend to be mechanical engineers because they once tuned a PID.

>One related problem I see is that Computer Science tends to be under-estimated by other engineering fields.

If Bachelor of Science computer science grads were that much more extraordinary, they wouldnt be working side by side with non-degreed programmers.

Chem Engineer here, I wrote random forest once. My coworker with a CS degree, all front end work.

My mistake. If you wrote a random forest once, it certainly means that you should be the CTO of Google. And that chem engineers are all smarter than computer scientists.

The fact that in 99% of cases "software engineer" is just an aggrandizing title given by management to any and every programmer at their company should put a bullet in the head of the pretentions of this being an engineering field.

The term is used ubiquitously in the field of technology and has been for a long time. We also have Tech or Software Architects, and quite obviously they don't do Real Architecture™ or civil engineering, but the concept makes sense.

It's just a job title, arguably one without the protections or standards afforded to chartered engineers, and with an incredibly low barrier to entry. Pretty much the reason we have to do this ridiculous dance with tech tests, LeetCode, and 12 stage interview processes.

> It's just a job title

Exactly my point.