this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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Not engineer.
At least here in Germany, engineer is a protected profession. Other than that: All of the above.
Interesting. In the US, all kinds of jobs are called engineers
Yeah, same in the UK. Really annoyed me that the plumber, electrician.. etc were all engineers. In Germany it's as protected as calling yourself doctor, which ultimately affects how people view the profession and the salaries they command
I mean, it's a protected term in Canada too but it doesn't necessarily lead to higher salaries.
My cousin who's an electrician made about as much as I did as an electrical engineer, and I left electrical engineering to be a software developer because it paid more. Engineering paid more than being an electrical technician / designer, but not by a huge amount.
I left aeronautical engineering to become a software "engineer" for similar reasons, salary and work culture. Actual engineering pays quite terribly in the UK, it's a fair bit better in Germany or the US from what I hear.
US much better than Germany I’ve heard!
Software yes, actual no
It does not only dictate your professional life/status in Germany, being a doctor, your social as well. Someone I know got a postdoc in germany, no luck finding a place to live until they started asking their german collegues to call and saying "doctor so-and-so is looking for an appartment". So, he gets one. The guy has a very long full name, so the nametag the landlord is gonna put on the postbox is way to long, but if you cut off the part where it says he is a doctor, it would fit. He insists to cut that part away, the landlord just refuses, says fuck your name and person basically, and cuts off part of his last name instead. Saying you are a doctor gets you first in fucking everything (maybe not lufthansa, then they just say 'senators' or something). Extremely class divided social society that.
Damn I’m surprised to hear that!
TBF some plumbers and electricians are qualified engineers, just not all.
Yeah it's difficult for me to name my title in English 'cause the word doesn't exist. I went to a technical high school, not university. (Not college!)
There are a few dick engineers working on the corner. Dickvelopers? Cockologists?
I believe job titles specifically are(were?) considered in exempt / non-exempt status for overtime.
Why Administrator is in a lot of titles also.
Hmmm. But all the people around me working in software studied multiple years in an Engineering field. In my case, I studied a 5-year industrial engineering and two masters afterwards; I feel very comfortable wearing the "software engineer" or more accurately "robotics engineer" badge.
During the 2008 recession, a lot of Uber drivers had engineering degrees. I guess we should start calling Uber drivers engineers too.
No, that's precisely the opposite of my point. If you drive an Uber, you're an Uber driver. People are "CEO" or "Judge" despite nobody having a CEO or Judge degree. Your profession is what you do, not what you happened to study in your teens to get there.
I understand your point now and I agree. Your colleagues that studied engineering became programmers. Why do people treat this as if that’s bad? It’s a beautiful profession.
I don't think it's bad, in fact I wonder the same. These are my colleagues because it's the same path I took - I now work developing self-driving cars (I slowly transitioned from aerospace to manufacturing automation to robotics) and it's the most rewarding job I've ever had, and it feels very much like engineering. I don't care if I'm not a "manufacturing engineer" anymore; I really like my job and I like my title to reflect somewhat accurately what I do, but that's the extent I care about it.
If you studied a technical science and do coding for that you may be allowed to be called ingenieur.
How come they don't count? They're figuring out how the machines should work, for money. That's engineering, right? (I'm an American mechanical engineer)
In Canada you have to be qualified and licensed to call yourself an engineer. There are people who can use the title "software engineer", but it's not the majority of people working in development.
That was a question a c.s. professor asked us.
Do you percieve yourself as Engineers?
No student said yes. He argued, that we are ( if we go this way). Using best practice, industrie norms and standards to create a product used by many. And if you are in medicial software, you errors can evem cost lifes - just like a bridge engineer!
However, Germany has a weird fablr with titles.
Softwareingenieur darf man sich nennen, wenn man ein mathematisch-naturwissenschaftliches Fach studiert hat, wo Informatik dazugehört. Somit ist Software Engineer oder Softwareingenieur die korrekte Berufsbezeichnung für alle mit einem Bachelor/Master oder höher in Informatik.
Dann muss man schon auch als solcher tätig sein, sonst nicht.
Sparkling Technologist.
That is not entirely true. It's a bit more complicated. Yes it is protected since the 1970s but it's more of an academic title. You needed to study something that is "mainly" of technological or scientific nature. Basically befire the Bologna reform every student in Tec. Unis/FHs did get the title Diplom-Ingenieur. So the engineer part was literally part of your degree. This of course also true in case you studied IT. So yes there are many who call themselves IT engineers also in Germany. However it's more of a philosophical question how much software development is actually engineering or rather craftsmanship.
They have to protect German engineering at all costs
It is in Canada too but that doesn't seem to stop companies from using the term
Here in portugal too. But there is a specific engineering field which is informatic engineering? Software engineer essentially