In a recent blog post that I read, the author said that he had just finished reading To Engineer is Human and said that programming is not engineering. While that may be true in the pure sense of programming, but to say that all programmers don’t do engineering is absolutely incorrect in my opinion. I read the book mentioned during my 4 years of engineering school to earn a BS in Engineering at Harvey Mudd College and find it hard to believe that I don’t use some of that education in my career as a software engineer (a term that the blog post author doesn’t believe in). I do a significant amount of design work in my day to day work and have to problem solve which I consider engineering. Pure programming, in my opinion, is the stuff that is being outsourced to countries like Russia and India (not to say that those countries don’t have engineers). Anyone can write code according to specification, but it takes thinking to design software, analyze risks (in most cases not physical risks), and do cost/benefit analysis; skills that I learned in my training as an engineer.
This will probably be an ongoing debate that will never have an agreement, but it saddens me to see people lump together people that have an engineering background with people that just decided to write code as a hobby (some of those people are good enough, in my opinion, to be engineers).