Re: Engineers, Computer Scientists and Programmers

Subject: Re: Engineers, Computer Scientists and Programmers
From: "Rollings, Gill" <WGILLR -at- WOK-MSMAIL-GW -dot- ISL -dot- COM>
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 1994 12:39:00 PDT

LaVonna wrote that "many of you call your software developers (programmers)
by the title "engineer." Around here, the holy title of "engineer" is only
bestowed upon those possessing degrees such as ME, EE, PE, etc."

I used to work in the Engineering Faculty of a British University. A few
years ago, the Department of Computer Science (which began life as a sub-set
of the Department of Mathematics and eventually gained independence) was
moved from the Science Faculty to the Engineering Faculty, which was not
popular with anyone. There was a lot of competitiveness between the staff
and students on all sides. The Computer Science brigade certainly didn't
want to be called "engineers". However, there was a degree course called
Computer Systems Engineering, which was taught by a group of staff from the
Departments of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Engineering
Mathematics (the latter was not a part of the Maths dept., but had always
been a small department in the Faculty of Engineering).

So where did they all end up? Most of the computer science graduates became
accountants (to their tutors' distress) and the electrical engineers became
computer programmers. Too much maths and too many chips respectively, I
guess. You can call a computer science student an engineer to suit the
administrators, but deep down inside, he'll always be a mathematician...

Oh, by the way - the standard of written English was a cause of much concern
to the academic staff as well as the secretarial staff. Many of our
students took 3 science subjects (e.g., Pure Maths, Applied Maths, Physics)
for their 'A' level examinations (at 18) and hadn't had to write a 'proper'
English essay for a good 2 years before they came into our tender care.

(this is just personal observation and I'm not generalising beyond the
building I worked in, ok?)

Gill Rollings, Technical Writer, Internet Systems Ltd
gill -dot- rollings -at- isl -dot- com


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