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  3. The term engineer - it's getting a little loose....

The term engineer - it's getting a little loose....

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  • D den2k88

    Ravi Bhavnani wrote:

    Unlike software engineers, electrical, mechanical, civil, aeronautical and other types of engineers work with extremely well defined specifications.

    Tell me you never worked for pharmaceutical, food safety, automotive, avionics, naval, trainlines and biomedical without telling it.

    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 on last edited by
    #39

    yeah, I missed this comment. I've worked in missile systems (air to air, how to have a bad day) and electronic warfare. I suppose we had specs, but all it took was for the Soviets to get creative and the current specs went out the window. I need to go fix my high tech washing machine... again....

    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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    • P Peter Shaw

      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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      Alister Morton
      wrote on last edited by
      #40

      Carbohydrate and protein materials construction engineer?

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      • C charlieg

        yeah, I missed this comment. I've worked in missile systems (air to air, how to have a bad day) and electronic warfare. I suppose we had specs, but all it took was for the Soviets to get creative and the current specs went out the window. I need to go fix my high tech washing machine... again....

        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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        den2k88
        wrote on last edited by
        #41

        Some of those are hard and not negotiable though, i.e. the warhead has to be primed after a certain clearance from the aircraft. This includes a metric ton of physics, electronics and software to work together - in my opinion every time you have to know multiple disciplines to make a software you are doing engineering. A simple push-piston eject system on a conveyor brings along a bunch of hard requirements that many "software developers" cannot approach, becasue you have to take into account mechanical delays, non uniform accelerations, blank times, shifting of items on the conveyor, synchronization between software, piston and items on the conveyor... and it's EASY, baceause usual tolerances are well above 10ms. Managing the blank times of paired mosfets in 20 Mhz modulation center-pulse to avoid 100A short circuits is... different. And it's a tiny part of a FOC algorithm.

        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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        • A Alister Morton

          Carbohydrate and protein materials construction engineer?

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          Peter Shaw
          wrote on last edited by
          #42

          🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 Give them time.

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          • D den2k88

            Some of those are hard and not negotiable though, i.e. the warhead has to be primed after a certain clearance from the aircraft. This includes a metric ton of physics, electronics and software to work together - in my opinion every time you have to know multiple disciplines to make a software you are doing engineering. A simple push-piston eject system on a conveyor brings along a bunch of hard requirements that many "software developers" cannot approach, becasue you have to take into account mechanical delays, non uniform accelerations, blank times, shifting of items on the conveyor, synchronization between software, piston and items on the conveyor... and it's EASY, baceause usual tolerances are well above 10ms. Managing the blank times of paired mosfets in 20 Mhz modulation center-pulse to avoid 100A short circuits is... different. And it's a tiny part of a FOC algorithm.

            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 on last edited by
            #43

            Agreed. For the AIM54C, there was a minimum amount of acceleration before arming the warhead (my guess, I never saw the specs). But if the motor did not fire, then you had a very, very expensive dumb bomb.

            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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            • P Peter Adam

              Probably a typo, "Senior Firewball Engineer". Think Gandalf.

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              charlieg
              wrote on last edited by
              #44

              I had some thoughts on your post. Obviously Tolkein's work inspired D&D, but I can only remember limited incidents of "magic" and that mostly to the elves.

              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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              • C charlieg

                I had some thoughts on your post. Obviously Tolkein's work inspired D&D, but I can only remember limited incidents of "magic" and that mostly to the elves.

                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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                Peter Adam
                wrote on last edited by
                #45

                No one seems to know what a Senior Fireall Engineer is, so, maybe, they are elves.

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                • C charlieg

                  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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                  User 13790572
                  wrote on last edited by
                  #46

                  You all wanna hear something funny? My title is Associate Software Engineer. I just read this thread two days ago. About 10 minutes ago, my boss told me there is a reorg going on. My duties and salary will remain the same, but my title is changing to Developer I. SOMEONE told my bosses about this discussion!!! :laugh:

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                  • R Ravi Bhavnani

                    I was advocating designing software in a way that makes it easier to extend and change, when change is warranted.  Some ways of achieving this is by modularity, maintaining separation of concerns, abstraction, loose coupling and encapsulation.  While following these principles won't guarantee the software we build will be easy to extend and modify, not doing any of these things will almost certainly ensure that it will be difficult to extend the software. cf: Bob Martin's story about the Sword C++ debugger. Clean Code with Uncle Bob Episode 1[^] /ravi

                    My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com

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                    jschell
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #47

                    Ravi Bhavnani wrote:

                    not doing any of these things will almost certainly ensure that it will be difficult to extend the software.

                    While doing those things poorly will make it impossible and cost more just to maintain

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                    • J jschell

                      Ravi Bhavnani wrote:

                      not doing any of these things will almost certainly ensure that it will be difficult to extend the software.

                      While doing those things poorly will make it impossible and cost more just to maintain

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                      Ravi Bhavnani
                      wrote on last edited by
                      #48

                      jschell wrote:

                      While doing those things poorly will make it impossible and cost more just to maintain

                      Doing anything poorly will make the software difficult and more costly to maintain. /ravi

                      My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com

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                      • L LordWabbit1

                        Couldn't agree more - I am not even comfortable with the term "Software Engineer". "If engineers built like programmers code the first wood pecker that came along would destroy civilization." I forget who said it, but it's so true. It reminds me of peons giving themselves grander and grander titles to stroke their egos. FYI - I am a programmer, and I take offense at being called a "Software Engineer". Engineers work for a living, programmers copy paste code from StackOverflow for a living.

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                        jschell
                        wrote on last edited by
                        #49

                        LordWabbit1 wrote:

                        "If engineers built like programmers code the first wood pecker that came along would destroy civilization."

                        Fallingwater. Designed by an engineer and built by his firm. Considered a masterpiece. Despite the fact that its signature feature was propped up by rigged 2x4s because the original design was flawed.

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                        • M Member 10415611

                          Related to the humorous aspect of this post, I have a friend who worked in the building industry in the UK mostly as a bricklayer. He told me he had a series of jobs working in crematoriums building the “ovens” with special fireproof bricks. I guess he’d qualify as a firewall engineer! On a more serious note, I’ve said b4 on this forum, the use of the term “engineer” is highly regulated in most jurisdictions (I’m familiar with Canada, USA & UK). You cannot call yourself an engineer unless u have a recognized engineering degree & you have met the conditions to get a license to practice such as a P.Eng.(Canada), P.E.(US) or C.E.(UK) or similar elsewhere. If you call yourself an engineer without a license & you are reported, the relevant governing body (e.g. Professional Engineers Ontario where I live) will pursue you. It’s usually people like those who call themselves HVAC engineers who fix furnaces & A/C units that get in trouble but I have seen one or two cases where something similar to software engineer got someone in trouble. In most cases, the resolution is a warning to stop using the term engineer but I’ve seen cases where the courts fined those ignoring the warning.

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                          jschell
                          wrote on last edited by
                          #50

                          Member 10415611 wrote:

                          You cannot call yourself an engineer unless u have a recognized engineering degree & you have met the conditions to get a license to practice such as a P.Eng.(Canada), P.E.(US) or C.E.(UK)

                          Rather certain that in the US at least in some states you can in fact call yourself an 'engineer' but you cannot claim that you are a 'licensed engineer'. But quite a few states require that hair stylists be licensed also. And getting that license also requires showing proficiency in the occupation.

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                          • U User 13790572

                            You all wanna hear something funny? My title is Associate Software Engineer. I just read this thread two days ago. About 10 minutes ago, my boss told me there is a reorg going on. My duties and salary will remain the same, but my title is changing to Developer I. SOMEONE told my bosses about this discussion!!! :laugh:

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                            charlieg
                            wrote on last edited by
                            #51

                            what's your degree in? curious. The boss has no clue. That crap goes way up in corporate HR. where there is no O2

                            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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