Engineers in U.S. vs. India

[Steve Mynott]

Jim Dixon wrote:

> On Wed, 7 Jan 2004, Steve Mynott 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.
> 
> 
> Go to Jobserve and count.  I did, about a year ago.  I found 612
> references in a 5-day period, as compared with 1651 for Java and 1889
> for C++.

What to call people who write software is problematic.

"software engineer" is a job title like "programmer" or "developer" 
(often with senior or junior as a prefix).  Senior meaning that you get 
paid a little more since you have more experience rather than being a 
manager. I never had a programming job where the language was specified 
in the title.  I am talking here of permanent work rather than contract 
style.

Searching on jobserve (the main UK IT job site) I get

3123 hits for developer
2009 engineer
806 software developer
803 software engineer
766 programmer
201 software programmer

So programmer is the unpopular job title not engineer, probably because 
it seems to have a bit of an outdated 1970s punched and magnetic tape 
type reputation.

> My point is not that there are no software engineers in the world, but
> that the term "engineer" is often used quite loosely and means vastly
> different things in different places.

Agreed

> The term 'software engineer' is becoming less common in the States these
> days.  I have watched the job title wax and wane for more than twenty
> five years.  I think that it was most fashionable in the early 1980s.

Any Americans care to comment on this?

> You don't understand.  I have never ever heard of any school in the UK or
> the United States, no matter how bad, where degrees are routinely and
> rather openly sold, or where riots on campus, usually in response to
> examinations, frequently involve lethal weapons and deaths.
> "Unbelievably bad" means just that.

I think people can still get a good education even in unstable and 
poorer nations.  You don't need to spend many dollars to run Linux and 
print out downloaded PDFs. There were campus deaths in the American and 
French student riots of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Oxford and 
Cambridge Universities openly sell masters degrees.

The examinations systems in many British influenced countries in the 
east resemble 1950s UK ones in their high standards and there doesn't 
seem to be much doubt that British examinations have been dumbed down 
since the 1980s to improve pass percentages.  It doesn't seem to me 
likely a doctor's son in Bangalore is automatically going to get a worse 
education than the average street kid in South Central LA or Hackney.

The Asperger enhanced asian engineering, physics and maths geeks shut in 
their rooms with an internet link won't be the ones running around 
killing people.  They are more likely to be hacking NASA via abuse of 
their local inband trunk signaling and gaining an excellent education in 
C buffers, UNIX and international telecommunications systems.  And 
hopefully subscribing to this list and reading Murray Rothbard.

> I am not India-bashing.  I just think that the people who are so concerned
> about the threat of India wiping out the US software industry are uhm
> let's say a bit unrealistic.  It might be a concern 30 years from now,
> although I am skeptical even of that.

Agreed.  They will get a bigger slice of a bigger pie but still a 
smaller serving than the US.

I remember the Americans being scared about the "Japanese Are Coming 
With Their Expert Systems" hype of the early 1980s.  And they never came 
despite many yen being wasted by MITI.  The only currently popular 
Japanese computer language Ruby is pretty much a copy of a European one 
(python).

-- 
1024/D9C69DF9 Steve Mynott <steve at tightrope.demon.co.uk>