In Canada you can't call yourself an engineer unless you studied engineering in university and went through licensing.
It's not really enforced in tech, but for me the definition is someone who at the minimum studied an engineering degree. Calling yourself an engineer when you studied Computer Science is a bit odd to me.
Lots of CS programs in the US are accredited by ABET [1] (our professional engineering standards board) and graduates from said programs are eligible to take the PE exam.
I call myself an engineer and is anyone has a problem with that, I just point out that I graduated from an engineering college and am eligible to become a PE, and will, should the world ever decide that's an important credential for building software. I work with tons of Mechanical and Aeronautical engineers, none of whom seem to take any issue with my holding a title of engineer.
That list has some rather notable omissions. Stanford isn’t on there, nor is CMU, nor any of the Ivies besides UPenn.
This frustrates me because ABET degrees are required for a bunch of government jobs (and the patent bar). While it might make sense for certain fields, it’s silly to gate CS jobs on a credential that the field evidentially doesn’t take seriously.
Accreditation is weird. I lived with some engineers at university and they had a huge range of interesting courses they could choose. In physics we had mostly core modules and a smattering of electives.
I asked whether they could take the courses they liked (eg mix a bit of civil, mechanical and electrical) and they said in theory they could, in practice nobody does because your degree wouldn't be accredited. And no accredited degree, no job in engineering. I think for civil it made a bigger difference than the others.
I always thought that was quite sad, since the mathematicians did whatever the hell they wanted between maths, engineering, CS and physics and still ended up with a maths degree.
I'm fully OK with the distinction because of the licensing process and strict requirements on engineer-certified work, but as someone with a CS degree from a Canadian university I can tell you with confidence that my friends in the software engineering pathway had probably 90% the same course load as I did.
Really the only major difference at our university (IMO) was that they had a capstone project they did as a group and took two semesters, while mine was done individually and took one semester.
In my experience at UVic (6 months fresh) the CS students did more theory of computation, and SEng had formal requirements and specification writing, engineering economics, and project management courses that CS did not. And also yes, the capstone. So, those are the features which distinguish software big-E iron-ring engineering from computer science, in my mind.
e: and yes, cf. the sibling comment, some of those courses were mandatory curricula set by The Professional Body Formerly Known As APEGBC (I forget what they're called now).
Absolutely, not disputing that. I just took offense to the "Calling yourself an engineer when you studied Computer Science is a bit odd to me" statement. I don't think the degree makes the difference, the licensing does.
I'm suspicious of any attempt to place so much importance on the name of a degree. I'm not even convinced there's a meaningful distinction that can be made between the two. Computer science topics like finite state machines are central to software engineering, and engineering ideas around correctness, safety and reliability form the basis of a lot of CS research.
The main difference is that engineers have a code of ethics they're expected to uphold, with the threat of taking away your certification if you don't.
Note that licencing is country-specific issue. Where i live 'engineer' is just an academic degree on the same level as 'master', just issued by technical university instead of 'general' university.
In Sweden, engineer is also a protected title, but computer science is aligned perfectly with software engineer because engineer basically says 3-5 years of "practical math of that field". Learning Python would not be "practical math", learning the O notation and linear algebra would.
Most US universities from what I've seen don't offer a different track for software engineering vs computer science, it's all under computer science. Most universities also have computer science in the college of engineering.
I think the issue is just university programs aren't granular enough.
Computer Science is an "engineering degree" at many universities. The distinction of which school a degree belongs to at a university is basically arbitrary.
I am definitely against the idea of licensing or professional organizations gating who gets to call themselves something. I think it's OK for an organization to invent their OWN term and branding, but they cannot take a generic word like 'engineering' and add regulatory capture on top of it. For instance, if IEEE or ACM wanted to license programmers, they are free to come up with a process for licensing with a title like "IEEE Software Engineer". The market can decide if that bears any value. But that value has to stand on its own, and not rely on government intervention granting those organizations a monopoly over the term 'engineer'.
It's not really enforced in tech, but for me the definition is someone who at the minimum studied an engineering degree. Calling yourself an engineer when you studied Computer Science is a bit odd to me.