Licensed Engineers

Closing out this series¹, the third most common reason I’ve seen thrown around for why software engineering isn’t real engineering is:

Real engineers have a license. Software engineers don’t

In the United States you can get become a Professional Engineer. Canada has licenses and the Iron Ring², which acknowledges the responsibilities an Engineer takes on towards society. Other countries have similar systems.

To the best of my knowledge, the only place that has a Software Engineering specialty for Professional Engineers is Texas, and while that’s called Software Engineering, it’s really more about computer hardware engineering, and the number of licenses issued is vanishingly small. In the 20+ years that specialty has existed, there has been no uptick in licensed Software Engineers nor has there been a demand for them. Neither from people in the field, industry, nor from any government.

With that as background, while it is true that some engineers have those licenses, most people with engineering degrees that work in their chosen field as engineers don’t. And no one says they’re not engineers. If most traditional engineers don’t bother to get a license when they could but are still called engineers, it’s not reasonable to say Software Engineers who don’t have a non-existent license aren’t engineers.

All that said though, it is important to note that just because you write code, you’re not necessarily a Software Engineer. There are lots of extremely skilled, well trained, and talented people who can build infrastructure. In fact, you can’t build and maintain today’s society without them. But many (most?) of them aren’t engineers. They’re technicians. They’re operators. They’re builders.

The same is true for software. There are many people who develop software. From Lego Mindstorm robots to Excel macros to websites to astrophysical signal processing. There are no-code solutions like LabVIEW and now Vide Coding. That’s all programming and software development. It’s important. It can be fun. And it can be crucial to advancing the state of the art in whatever field it’s being applied to.

But just as with your home contractor or heavy equipment operator, the fact that you’re building something doesn’t mean you’re doing engineering. Engineering is about why you make the choices you do and how you go about understanding and balancing between competing constraints that exist in a specific context that you find yourself in to provide optimum value.

And that right there is why Software Engineering really is Engineering.