I am an Engineer
I am an Engineer
I fought to bring the software legitimacy so that it—and those building it—would be given its due respect and thus I began to use the term ‘software engineering’ to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering, yet treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process. When I first started using this phrase, it was considered to be quite amusing. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline
Margaret Hamilton, Apollo and Skylab software lead
a person trained and skilled in the design,construction, and use of engines or machines…
Dictionary.com; definition of engineer
I am an Engineer, its just that the engines or machenery I construct as an engineer are digital. Where some engineers may have to find clever ways to get around terrain, anything i build has to fit to the target computer. Where some engineers have to think about pressures and stresses and temporature, i have to think about data throughput, user concurrency, and responsiveness. We both must consider the project costs, timelines and maintenance.
So, why am I talking about this? Well, I did once recieve snide remarks from a mechanical engineer that what I did to make my money was not really engineering. But then I saw this in a presentation about where the term comes from, and its no less than NASA, operating at peak awesome getting a human to the moon. The quote from Margaret above, about getting the respect that she and her team deserved, reminded me of that.
Now don’t get me wrong, while Margaret and the rest of the NASA team’s achievements are awesome, in the true sense of the word, you can have good engineers and bad engineers. However I get the impression that until this point a lot of what programmers did was seen as ‘geek stuff’ for academics, far away from the nitty gritty of doing something useful.