Are Programmers Engineers?
Eric Sink, who’s blog I heartily recommend, calls himself a software craftsman, an excellent and highly accurate title for any good computer programmer. But Eric also thinks that programmers are not engineers. He thinks this, apparently, because he majored in computer science and has worked only as a programmer, never as as an engineer – and that’s why he’s wrong. For example, he says, “To be an engineer, you have to be licensed. You have to pass the Professional Engineer exam.” Nonsense. Very few working engineers are licensed Professional Engineers, simply because there’s no reason for them to want to be. There are probably entire sub-fields of engineering (chip design, perhaps) where no one holds a PE license. The NCEES Fundamentals of Engineering Exam [1] is the first step in the process of getting a PE license. As it happened, I passed it, and was duly anointed an “Engineer in Training”, but I knew I didn’t need to pass that exam or get a PE’s license – and probably never would ev
