Im commiserating with a friend who recently left the technology industry to return to entertainment. Im not a programmer, he begins, explaining some of the frustrations of his former workplace, before correcting himself, oh, engineer, in tech-bro speak. Though to me, engineers are people who build bridges and follow pretty rigid processes for a reason.
His indictment touches a nerve. In the Silicon Valley technology scene, its common to use the bare term engineer to describe technical workers. Somehow, everybody who isnt in sales, marketing, or design became an engineer. Were hiring engineers, read startup websites, which could mean anything from Javascript programmers to roboticists.
The term is probably a shortening of software engineer, but its use betrays a secret: Engineer is an aspirational title in software development. Traditional engineers are regulated, certified, and subject to apprenticeship and continuing education. Engineering claims an explicit responsibility to public safety and reliability, even if it doesnt always deliver.
The title engineer is cheapened by the tech industry.
Recent years have seen prominent failures in software. Massive data breaches at Target, Home Depot, BlueCross BlueShield, Anthem, Harvard University, LastPass, and Ashley Madison only scratch the surface of the cybersecurity issues posed by todays computer systems. The Volkswagen diesel-emissions exploit was caused by a software failing, even if it seems to have been engineered, as it were, deliberately.
But these problems are just the most urgent and most memorable. Todays computer systems pose individual and communal dangers that wed never accept in more concrete structures like bridges, skyscrapers, power plants, and missile-defense systems. Apples iOS 9 update reportedly bricked certain phones, making them unusable. Services like Google Docs go down for mysterious reasons, leaving those whose work depends on them in a lurch. Your password contains invalid characters, a popular tweet quotes from an anonymous website, before twisting the dagger, No, your startup contains incompetent engineers.
These might seem like minor matters compared to the structural integrity of your office building or the security of our nations nuclear-weapons arsenal. But then consider how often your late-model car fails to start inexplicably or your office elevator traps you inside its shaft. Computing has become infrastructure, but it doesnt work like infrastructure.
When it comes to skyscrapers and bridges and power plants and elevators and the like, engineering has been, and will continue to be, managed partly by professional standards, and partly by regulation around the expertise and duties of engineers. But fifty years worth of attempts to turn software development into a legitimate engineering practice have failed.
Just as the heavy industry can greenwash to produce the appearance of environmental responsibility and the consumer industry can pinkwash to connect themselves to cause marketing, so the technology industry can engineerwashleveraging the legacy of engineering in order to make their products and services appear to engender trust, competence, and service in the public interest.
