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The Life of a Software Engineer
Jonathan Wise writes to share with us an interesting bit of prose describing life as a software engineer. "I am, in the States, known as a Software Engineer. In Canada we're not allowed to call ourselves engineers, although the discipline is no less rigorous than any other kind of engineering. But perhaps its for the best, because 'engineering' describes only a part of what I do. A software developer must be part writer and poet, part salesperson and public speaker, part artist and designer, and always equal parts logic and empathy."
It's a troll, and definitely NSFW.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Parent post contains link to nasty shock site which screws with your browser.
this is my sig
- Sorry about the site being down. Its probably not a coincidence that I made Slashdot AND my host (which, to be fair, survived a Digg-rush awhile ago) is having troubles. I'm on the horn with them right now.
- A few people, who likely didn't make it to the site, like to make broad generalizations about geeks of this sort not having sex. I'd like to point out for the record that I'm married, have one child and another on the way. This suggests that I've had sex at least twice. And my wife is very beautiful.
- The intent was not to gripe about Canada's standards for the term "engineer." I only pointed that out the difference between my home country, and my current country of employ. I prefer the term "software developer" myself, but it doesn't really matter to me.
- The intent was also not to be pompous or fuel my own ego, it was to describe, as eloquently as I knew how, what most of us here on Slashdot are. Although the stigma is going away, us geeky types tend to be considered only that: geeks. When really there is art and beauty to what we do. I'm not even as skilled a programmer as I imagine most are, but I wanted to lend my prose to our art because I believe it is valuable. But flame on, if you must!
Thanks for reading, hopefully the site will be back up soon! I'd copy and paste the article text here, but I wasn't expecting this and don't have an offline copy!
Jonathan Wise
Dr. David Parnas actually succeeded in becoming a Professional Engineer (P.Eng) in Ontario as a "Software Engineer". He showed that there are rigorous ways of designing software so that the tenets of engineering safety can be upheld.
So yes you can be a software engineer in Canada. But not by getting a cereal box certification from Microsoft. Perhaps graduating with a degree in Software Engineering from a University like Waterloo or Toronto, which do have software engineering courses.
That's what I came in here to say.
You CAN be a Software Engineer in Canada. You just have to get a Bachelor's Degree in Engineering (or similar) with Software as your discipline. Then register with your appropriate body (APEG-BC in British Columbia) and there you go. The University of Victoria offers a B.Eng. in Software Engineering. For the first four years after graduation, you can call yourself an Engineer In Training. After that, you can get your seal and stamp as a Professional Software Engineer.
In other words, yes, you can call yourself an Engineer. Just not after mailing in box-tops to MS.
(I'm an EE. (in Training) )
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Ha! You want to talk about small mistakes? Here's a small mistake: a contractor didn't want to bother threading a few nuts up a really long rod, so he cut the rod into three pieces and attached them to the beams they were supporting separately. No big deal, right? I mean, I wouldn't want to have to spend hours spinning nuts on a rod either!
Well, guess what: it killed 114 people! So don't go telling me that software is "different" because of small mistakes. Because it really damn well isn't!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
And another thing-- my company decided that they wanted to go from 99% bug free to 99.999% bug free software rollouts (a bug costing us perhaps $1000 per minute of downtime).
The result is that our software takes a minimum of 8 to 12 times longer to roll out than it did before. It is now so slow that our developers are starting to lose their skill set because there is so much downtime.
Where before we could roll it out-- suffer the "$30k" loss, fix the bug (which takes weeks of testing but only a few minutes in production to flush out), and put in a fixed build in a total of 2x the time.
And the real kicker is that we STILL get bugs in production after all that testing because the best test site in the world doesn't simulate 70,000 users hammering on the software. (and the company doesn't begin to pay for the "best" test site anyway).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Not a flame as such, although much of what you say is flameworthy. You lack clue.
"The professional association allows them to hide behind a large entity, with deep pockets, such that any litigation against a single individual, is futile."
Um, no. The Professional Engineer Association of which I am a member has about 18000 members and we pay about $225 per year. An annual budget of $4 million is not "deep pockets" by anybody's definition, at least not when stacked up against corporate clients with several orders of magnitude more money. More to the point, the Association doesn't spend _any_ of its money defending engineers against litigation for faulty work. They do spend it pursuing discipline against incompetent or unethical members. The record of discipline against members is public, you can usually find it on their websites. Try APEGBC, PEO or APEGGA for examples. Every month we get to read about a handful of cases where somebody is disciplined for substandard work.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.