You Guys Need To Stop Calling Yourselves Engineers; You're Making the Term Worthless

Please stop calling yourselves Engineers. You're not. The worst devs I know are the same ones who insist on calling themselves engineers.

How many times have you heard "move fast and break things" at your job? I've heard it a million times. That's literally the opposite of what an actual engineer does.

When a real engineer builds a bridge, he doesn't just take out his hammer and start building the damn thing. He doesn't just start building and hope the thing stands up by itself someday.

He doesn't say "some guy online told me about a new framework (Plastik, current version: 0.3.1-Alpha) for making the beams out of plastic and I want to try it out on this bridge to see how it works" and then just casually start using it halfway through construction.

He doesn't say "I don't have time to test this" or "following a consistent architecture isn't important." He sure as hell doesn't say "let's just release it and see if it breaks, we can always fix it in the next sprint."

But you spent hundreds or thousands of hours on leetcode learning about architecture! Well the cook at McDonald's has spent hundreds or thousands of hours flipping burgers, but that doesn't make him a Burger Retroversion Engineer. It makes him a burger flipper.

To be called an engineer in a traditional field in most states you need to get a degree, pass a licensing exam, and work under an experienced engineer for several (4+) years.

To be called a software engineer... You don't need anything. You just start calling yourself one. Like a janitor who just decides to start calling himself a Contaminant Removal Engineer. You're that guy. Good job. Are you happier with yourself now that you're a fake engineer?

Are you confident that in the unlikely scenario that someone's life depended on your code, it would work as expected? If not, you aren't an engineer. So stop calling yourself one. You sound like an idiot.

There are plenty of other words you can use. Software developer. Programmer. Hacker. Pick whichever one you like best, or make up your own.

Edit: I'm getting a lot of hate for this so far, so i want to say, yeah, I know it's aggressive but I just reviewed my coworker's code from Friday. It was:

1. A switch statement with only one case
2. Wrapped in a for loop with a break statement at the end so it only looped once
3. No edge case handling
4. The meat of the code was obviously copied directly from stack overflow

And THEN when I commented on it he insisted he was an engineer, and knew what he was doing. For fuck's sake. I never facepalmed so hard in my life.