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I am not a software engineer

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Someone at work sent me an interesting article decrying the absence of software engineering.

I tried leaving a comment but the site seems to have swallowed it. One of those capcha-plagued things. So I'll repeat myself here.

Certification as engineers would have helped with standards and accountability, to be sure. But we never stood the chance to be software engineers. Society only ever needed a limited number of actual certified Engineers, but it needed hundreds of thousands of people to write some small increment of software here or there. Millions? Tens of millions? No way you could wait around for a certified Engineer to write a widget to automate the sending of some files to the London office. And so the unwashed teeming masses of “software engineers” was born.

The Mythical Man-Month had a couple of things right: you need your star "surgeon" and your project manager to be: pros; separate; and equal. As the years wear on, I'm more and more convinced that it's those two that really matter. Labels on the methodology don't really seem to change the outcome once those roles and their relationship are set, in my experience.