I'm going to make myself very plain: For anyone who intends to pursue a technical/engineering career path, as opposed to switching to the managerial/entrepreneurial path, you're going to need to master some very difficult technical subjects. The point of calling a profession "engineering" implies that there is quite a bit of depth to the technical side. Therefore, calling someone a "senior" engineer implies that they have a good grasp of that deep skill-set.
> This is the kind of thing that bugs me, though, this sort of software-engineer exceptionalism. We like to pretend that somehow we're the only ones who have complex projects with tight deadlines and changing requirements.
In other news, the lead civil engineer on the local levy project has only two years experience and their only training was an associates degree in CAD, but don't worry because they used to be a lawyer and so they know all about "shifting requirements, teamwork and pragmatic approaches to dealing with a client's wants".
>They're bad at it because they got a bunch of ideology about theoretical purity shoveled into their heads in college instead of a bunch of pragmatism.
And the very first comment on that post is a better rebuttal than I have time to write up:
But working as a consultant to a lot of big companies (and a lot of small ones) over the past few years, I don't think the degree matters so much. The thing that matters to the exclusion of everything else is which side you're on: are you working to make something great or are you collecting a paycheck and trying to stay out of the line of fire?
A CS degree, X years of experience in tech, writing PDP-11 assembly in your diapers, etc. are terrible indicators of which side of that divide someone will be on.
> This is the kind of thing that bugs me, though, this sort of software-engineer exceptionalism. We like to pretend that somehow we're the only ones who have complex projects with tight deadlines and changing requirements.
In other news, the lead civil engineer on the local levy project has only two years experience and their only training was an associates degree in CAD, but don't worry because they used to be a lawyer and so they know all about "shifting requirements, teamwork and pragmatic approaches to dealing with a client's wants".
>They're bad at it because they got a bunch of ideology about theoretical purity shoveled into their heads in college instead of a bunch of pragmatism.
Others have addressed this better than I can[0].
[0]http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/01/no-disrespect.html