Jim Dixon wrote:
The term 'engineer' is far from precise; in the UK most people who work with tools can be called engineers but people who write software generally are NOT called engineers. There are further complications: for example, in
I have had jobs as a "software engineer" in the UK and since the dot com bubble this hasn't been an uncommon job title. The UK tends to follow US fashions very closely importing in titles like CEO and CTO and the term "software engineer" is no different. As for your comments that "my impression is that India has a few excellent institutions and a vast number of unbelievably bad schools" I suspect this is true but applies equally to the UK and USA and indeed any country with a university system. Neither is graduating from a top engineering school such as Stanford any automatic guarantee of quality as anyone who has worked with these people knows. India has an excellent tradition in mathematics and some of the best software engineers I have worked with in the UK have been Indian graduates, since it's the most enterprising and highly qualified ones which tend to emigrate. O Reilly Associates recognise the importance of the Indian market by suppplying special low priced editions of their books to the Indian market. They are occasionally available as "grey imports" in the UK. -- 1024/D9C69DF9 Steve Mynott <steve@tightrope.demon.co.uk>