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you are not sure
that your not now theres monster everywere
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I'm sorry, but that makes no sense whatsoever. Please try writing it in your native language, and using Google Translate to produce an English version.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Just wanted to toss this out here and ask a question. Long before I earned my EE degree (yes, I know all about motors and other things), my dad was an EE for IBM. His favorite phrase when it was recruiting season was "I can teach an engineer how to program, I cannot teach a programmer how to engineer."
Yeah, maybe a bit bigoted but work with me. This was in the late 70s early 80s, so the term "software engineer" had not been coined yet. At my university, you could get a degree in computer science but that was it. Engineers used punch cards to talk to the IBM. Those other people got to use the terminals  .
So, I'm poking around on dice.com and I come across a job entry for "Senior Firewall Engineer."
wtf
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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I agree. Most software is not engineered. Web stuff in particular.
I'm a software developer.
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I use the term lightly - engineer. 120v scares me, 240+ I want to pee. 480 and up? hell no. There is some spooky **** mechanical engineers do as well as civil engineers (other than making targets - google it). Then there comes chemical engineers that I salute, and nukes I just see in the distance as they glow.
I have the degree for an EE. I wrote software most of my life. Sooo, when I started calling myself a sw engineer, my better half slapped me sideways - you are an EE and don't forget it. So, since then I'm an EE but I write software. Mostly embedded but I can do desktop as well. And I respect electricity. 
I still want to know wtf is a firewall engineer. I get the idea, but really?
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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I remember "sanitation engineer" was being discussed a few years ago. For a job opening for a janitor.
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It happened a LOT in the UK in the late 80's to mid 90's but back then it wasn't "engineer" that was the thing it was "technician".
I was a Computer Kid of the 1980's UK, Grew up with home computers that where primitive by todays standards, Sinclair ZX80/81, Commodore C16+4, Vic 20 and eventually onto the Acorn Machines, BBC B et al.
Since the age of 7 I've had an aptitude for this kind of stuff, and by the time I got to the later years in my Secondary School, I was effectively teaching the teachers on what the computers they had in the classrooms could do, so they could in turn be better informed what they where "reading from textbooks" to teach others.
As the 90's approached, the MS-DOS PC started to appear in UK homes, and it was a natural fit for me to want to become a "Computer Technician" at the time.
I left school and did my various BTEC's etc before spending a few years in the UK military doing communications stuff.
When I left the forces in late 1993, I came back to a world where EVERYONE was obsessed by being a "Technician" of some kind, this was bizarre to me as the very word "Technician" implies something that is "Technical" or "Technologically Related".
My CV included "Technician" several times as during my BTEC years I had worked part time for a few different companies as a trainee, and companies where salivating over the word in much the same way they salivate over "AI" and such like today.
Looking for a job was insane, trying to filter job listings by subjects I knew and including words like "Technician" was a thankless task, I regularly saw things like:
"Wanted: local pub requires cleanliness technician to maintain pub facilities" (Basically a pub cleaner)
or
"Immediate Start: TV Rental's technical customer sales advisement technician" (Basically a sales person who can talk tech)
It was the same then as it is now, Out of control marketing idiots allowed to get away with devaluing any word or topic they feel like, in order to push more sales.
We've seen a few other terminologies come and go over the years, but now that being an "engineer" of some kind is popular, we are seeing the same thing happen to the word "engineer" and "engineering" as a disciplined profession.
Don't even get me started on the HR and recruitment's use of the terminology!!!
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The one that got me was "sandwich artist". Take a guess where I saw that position advertised.
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Subway.
I'm still trying to find a way to use it as some sort of greeting when I walk in, and yet remain inconspicuous about it. But there's just no way of using it without sounding as dumb as, well, it sounds.
That, and the people Apple has working at their "genius bar". Makes me wish I could bring in a defective product, and watch them make the problem worse, just so I could sarcastically say "way to go, genius"...
Oh, and low-level employees that the higher-ups insist on calling "associates" so they somehow feel empowered. Wal-Mart's guilty of that. And given the type they employ, it only comes across as demeaning.
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Yup, our local store had many of those positions available when the new store first opened in the town where I live.
Another common name was also advertising at the time for coffee related artistry and technical based positions...
I wonder how long it's going to be before we see adverts for "Burger & Fries Engineers..."
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Carbohydrate and protein materials construction engineer?
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🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Give them time.
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800V crammed in a 20cm round box, it's FUN!
GCS/GE d--(d) s-/+ a C+++ U+++ P-- L+@ E-- W+++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
The shortest horror story: On Error Resume Next
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charlieg wrote: 120v scares me, 240+ I want to pee. 480 and up? hell no.
LOL!!! I don't blame you for that. But since I design systems that transport power at 120V through 69kV, I've had to get used to it. But it's still strange to open a cabinet and realize that if I stand a few inches closer, an arc could form and kill me, not to mention dimming the lights for a bit.
Will Rogers never met me.
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I will weigh in on both sides of this.
Engineering has a history of what emerged as accepted designs, formulas, and processes that generally produce safe, reliable products. Software can't make this claim, though I'd say that OO and patterns, in most settings, are an step in that direction. But systems are very diverse, so software remains far more craft and art than it does engineering.
On the other hand, much of my career (starting in 1981) was spent in a company whose products were becoming more and more dependent on software, and less so on hardware. Consequently, many EE types moved into software. Yes, they could do it, and most had a smattering of it in university, but few were or became good at it. I said it was like putting me in an EE role if my expertise was that I'd noodled around, building speakers in my basement.
One major difference, as I see it, is that the essence of software systems is evolution. Expecting a bridge to be lengthened by 30m as part of its "next release" would provoke derisive laughter, yet the equivalent is commonplace when working on software. How to deal with this is a central challenge.
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I agree. What "triggered" me - in a humorous way - was the term Firewall Engineer. I'm still chuckling.
I think I would lean more toward an engineer having more solid foundations in the basic sciences - physics, thermo, etc. Having said that, I have NEVER seen an engineer including myself pound out code like some of the CompSci folks I've worked with. Looking at the code witch as an example. I've worked with a few others. The code springs from their fingers, and their minds work at a level that makes me dizzy.
There was a book a read long ago about Star Wars. Not the movie, but President Reagan's vision of strategic missile defense. One of the pillars of the concept was the space based X-Ray laser. This was a device that was nuclear bomb powered - you aimed the lasing rods at targets and detonated the weapon where upon the x-rays from the detonation were directed at targets. Now, there are treaties and all sorts of problems putting (more?) nuclear weapons in orbit, but the idea came from some Lawrence Livermore PhD (might have been CalTech, I forget) who had a blue sky moment.
He spent the next few days pounding out simulation code to validate his idea. The concept had such potential that they piggy backed it on an upcoming nuclear weapons test. Yes, at the time the US was still detonating weapons under ground (mainly to develop the data so that designs could be confidently simulated). As I recall, the test was not successful, it was wildly successful.
Anyway, I still want to know what a firewall engineer is 
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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It's a Wizard from Dungeons & Dragons that can cast the spell Fire Wall with precision.
Bond
Keep all things as simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere
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Today there are so-called "engineering" students whose Bachelor's degree specialization is "Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning". Am not exactly sure whether these students will be engineers when they come out with the degree.
And once this AI hullabaloo dies down, where can they be employed, employable?
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Back in the early 80s (can't speak to much earlier or later since that is when I was in college) most of the major technical colleges (one of which I was attending) referred to their programming degrees as Software Engineering.
Why? Most likely because there were two camps, science and engineering, and you had to be in one or the other. The Computer Science side, which included both hardware and software, was much more abstract and theoretical and, at the time, tended not to produce people doing the actual work.
The disappearance of SE degrees in favor of CS degrees and the "developer" moniker came later as programming degrees proliferated. Probably because the other engineering programs derided software engineering as a degree for people who couldn't hack being "real" engineers so both sides felt the need for an amicable divorce.
Given what started happening at that time, I'm sure many of those newly minted SE's were crying all the way to the bank a few short years later.
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charlieg wrote: "Senior Firewall Engineer."
sounds to me like a fancy bricklayer.
Also the apocryphal
Yesterday I couldn't spell Engineer. Today I are one!
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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charlieg wrote: "Senior Firewall Engineer."
So...an almost-retired brick layer?
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Sometimes (most of the time) I am dense. I missed the joke. 
good morning
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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I've never been comfortable calling myself an engineer, but it's because I view programming as more of an art, a knack.
What I mean is with a system of any significant complexity things get complex rather than complicated in software, and the ability to repeat the project with a different set of developers is effectively nil.
Sure you can fulfill the same functional requirements, but the software will work entirely differently.
The electrical engineers I work with produce highly repeatable designs, for lack of a better way to express what I'm talking about.
And if I put a different team of engineers on the same project replicated twice, the results, while not identical, will be much more consistent between the two teams than they are with software.
That's not how I would define engineering though - like I don't want to commit a no true scotsman fallacy here. Rather, I'm trying to give an example where programming is more ... organic? messy? at the end of the day non-repeatable.
So among other reasons, that's why I'm uncomfortable with the term "software engineer", especially as it applies to me and the way I code.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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- "Programmer", "software developer" and "software engineer" are often lumped together and mean the same thing: a person who creates and modifies software. I don't have an issue with candidates describing themselves using any of these terms.
- Unlike software engineers, electrical, mechanical, civil, aeronautical and other types of engineers work with extremely well defined specifications. Experienced software engineers will design for extensibility and robustness (for example by building loosely coupled components) but this isn't guaranteed. Consequently, software often evolves in a manner that eventually causes it to become overly complicated and difficult or impossible to maintain, requiring The Great Rewrite.
- We software developers could learn a lot from the folks who engineered the modern day lightbulb. I can use a modern tri-light LED bulb in a 1960s lamp without worrying about compatibility. The tri-light feature may not work if the socket doesn't support it, but the lamp's operation will gracefully degrade to a simpler behavior. Granted, software is more complex, but you've gotta give credit to the designers of the light bulb and the machines that allow light bulbs to be manufactured, for designing for change.
/ravi
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