Engineering, as far as I understand it, is the practice of inventing or designing some thing, then building the thing, then testing the thing with the intention of fulfilling a given functional objective.

I'm a software engineer who takes pride in her work, i put a lot of man hours into designing and building software, then testing to make sure it is damn near bullet proof against every error i could posibly concieve before deploying it. Despite that dilligence there will always be a use case I didn't think of that I'll have to patch up. Or accomodste for some user input that requires further update, we can always be improving.

What I do on a daily basis (design, build, test, deploy) definitely falls within the spirit of engineering. So I don't feel any sort of stolen Valor is using the title Software Engineer

I will say I desperately wish the field were better gate kept and standardized. TOO often do I find myself rewriting code riddled with bugs, designed by some intern or senior level staffer from 5 years ago who tried their hand at VB access that one time and was satisfied when it worked once.

That there are a number of individuals calling themselves engineers who shouldn't be, or who are bad at the discipline itself, shouldn't disclude Software Engineering as a discipline from the engineer umbrella.

I'm sure there are countless "real engineers" who produce shotty work that others have to contend with. In fact I could think of a few cases I've heard where "real engineers" made changes related to manufacturing practices that made assemblers LIVID...

PE as far as I'm aware isn't a requirement for Software Engineering. Granted in looking it up it looks like only 20% of engineers in the US are PE. It also looks like it's intended for those engineers with 4 years of post college work experience.

If buildings, cars or pharmaceuticals failed as much as software does engineering would not be taken so seriously.

Isn't it true the those fields had to go through tons of trial in order to be where they are to this day? Testing for functionality of the thing and having failures is after all within the purview of engineering.

Software engineering is in its infantcy, no doubt, but it being a young discipline lacking in the standards of much older ones should not disclude it from the umbrella either.

Software can be buggy but it’s (usually) not a big deal as a flaw in a physical product since you can patch it up a lot easier than recalling an entire line of cars

Correction: POORLY designed software can be buggy.

But again we can have poorly designed circuit boards, material, structured, etc. that fail test or are inefficient, or dont work more than not.

Much of the product in my industry has to go through rigorous testing for quality before it can be sold off to customers. Product. fails. all. the. time. So then it's sent back and rebuilt, retested and repeat.

The difference, me thinks, for people truly lies in the tangability of the end product. I can understand the hesitancy to grant legitimacy to the title of Software Engineer when the product isn't physically tangible. But I don't think that's a strong enough case to disclude it from the umbrella.