Yay women in tech, yay women in science, yay women in engineering, but can I please be annoyed at all these coders that have never so much as seen Mohr's Circle calling themselves "engineers?" Back when I was an architectural consultant, we could face fraud charges for calling ourselves "Engineers" despite mechanical engineering degrees because our discipline wasn't licensed as "engineering" by the state. I'm glad you code like a whiz, pretty lady, and I bow to your mad skillz... But dammit, how 'come you don't have to worry about fraud charges?
I hate the term for different reasons. Calling ourselves engineers (or architects, of all things) is popular because computing is a really amorphous thing and pretending it's like engineering sort of works to give it some structure. It's not really like engineering at all though, and while pretending it is makes it easy to fit in to a corporate environment that understands what to do with engineers, we're straightjacketing ourselves when we do it. Because I had a math-heavy education, I usually think of what I do as being applied math, and for me programming seems very mathematical. I know people who started doing web things straight out of high school, and programming does not seem very mathematical at all to them, it seems like something artistic. I know people who are very into patterns and all that, and programming really does seem like engineering to them. That we can all understand what we're doing perfectly well in whatever terms make sense to us is a good thing, not something we should suppress by believing in analogies too much. It is frustrating and unproductive when the analogy doesn't fit.
You have just slightly touched on how I feel looking at this post. Equality in tech is something I think it's very important, to the point that I never stop whining about it, in fact. But holy hell it feels like they're too busy with our heads up our own asses to even shut up and write code. Too busy talking about the title "engineer", writing "everything you know is wrong, and I know because I'm a 30 y/o CEO of some tech-company" garbage articles. It's like if a bunch of writers sitting around debating moleskins to spiral-bounds before declaring who a "real writer" is. It's its own clique, I can't create intricate words but fuck I really really really hate it. Basically it doesn't matter who you are - if you're an "engineer", you're also, probably, an asshole.
Yes. Yes yes yes yes. That's exactly how I feel how. There are some great people in that industry, but the culture that is the Silicon Valley, to me, is insulating and way too self-congratulatory and out of touch with reality. Few things are more irritating to me than somebody who buys into that culture going on about the moral righteousness of whatever they're working on and spewing out nonsense instead of doing actual work. I realize that the show Silicon Valley is very satirical, but I still dislike it for the reasons above.
Most of the bloggers aren't the people out there writing code. It's a huge part of my frustration with reporting on women in tech. There's very few of us out there talking about ourselves, instead most people speak for us. I call myself a software engineer because that's the word for what I do. If there's a better word, I would use that. I don't really care too much about the title TBH.
The people who are writing code aren't the people writing most of the blog posts. There are people with both chops and a blog (Mark Dominus is great), but they only post when they have something worth saying. Most bloggers are has-beens, hucksters or wanna-bes.But holy hell it feels like they're too busy with our heads up our own asses to even shut up and write code.
calling themselves "engineers"
The Codeless Code has a good story on the difference between software engineers and "real" engineers.
And when the engineer asked "what happens when a truck drives across your software and falls into the river?" the monks hied themselves the fuck back to never-never land. That story illustrates that coders have more in common with dressmakers than engineers. The world needs both and both are honorable, storied professions... But the fact of the matter is, the physical and the conceptual lack commonality.
I have to call the "engineering" department at work when I want a drain unclogged. It boils my blood. (I never had a PE, but that's because auto engineers don't need one for some reason--legacy, I guess, since most didn't go to engineering school until like the 80s or something--ignition switch, anyone). It would be like your local phlebotomist insisting they be called 'doctor'.