I know plently of helpdesk guys that do engineering, if engineering is “identify an issue, find and implement a fix.” Its varying degrees of rudimentary, but the same could be said about anyone in conputer science.
The truth is no one in computer science, programmers, SREs or otherwise, are licensed engineers. Why does a programmer have more of a claim to an unearned title than anyone else in the field?
It’s exactly this. No one complains when IT infrastructure engineers design and build systems and call themselves engineers, even though they don’t have a PE certification. So if they can do it, why not support staff?
Programming grew up in an environment where failure is cheap (relatively speaking). You might make a mistake that costs five, six, or even seven figures (I’m sure I’ve made at least one seven figure mistake), but nobody will die from it. When people could die, such as flight control software, different development techniques for formal methods are used. Those tend to cost at least ten times more than other methods, so they aren’t used much otherwise.
If anything, we should lean into this as an advantage. Iterate even faster, catch failures faster, and fix it faster.
I mean, that is fine and all about the historical reasons we dont have engineer titles, but the OP comment was gatekeeping one part of IT from another like there was an actual legal distinction between a dev, someone in infrastructure or someone in support.
I know plently of helpdesk guys that do engineering, if engineering is “identify an issue, find and implement a fix.” Its varying degrees of rudimentary, but the same could be said about anyone in conputer science.
The truth is no one in computer science, programmers, SREs or otherwise, are licensed engineers. Why does a programmer have more of a claim to an unearned title than anyone else in the field?
It’s exactly this. No one complains when IT infrastructure engineers design and build systems and call themselves engineers, even though they don’t have a PE certification. So if they can do it, why not support staff?
Programming grew up in an environment where failure is cheap (relatively speaking). You might make a mistake that costs five, six, or even seven figures (I’m sure I’ve made at least one seven figure mistake), but nobody will die from it. When people could die, such as flight control software, different development techniques for formal methods are used. Those tend to cost at least ten times more than other methods, so they aren’t used much otherwise.
If anything, we should lean into this as an advantage. Iterate even faster, catch failures faster, and fix it faster.
I mean, that is fine and all about the historical reasons we dont have engineer titles, but the OP comment was gatekeeping one part of IT from another like there was an actual legal distinction between a dev, someone in infrastructure or someone in support.
There is not.
I mean there is distinction between software engineers and software developers
Neither role is legally defined, so I actually disagree.
You can make a case for there being a differnce, but because every job defines the roles in IT differently with no actual standard, it’s all opinion.