Don’t let him in the club.

Undersigned, Prompt Engineer.

Professional engineering is really about implementing processes and procedures that create reliable and dependable systems. Ultimately it’s about responsibility and risk management. Being an engineer has nothing to do with understanding or implementing technology or technical details and specifications (unless you are in an extremely junior level engineering position). That work already has another title: that’s called being a technologist (and there ain’t nothing wrong with that title and that work).

Very, very, very few technologists (including self-taught programmers, computer scientists, and even some engineering grads) have, or even understand the skills needed to manage technical risk, simply because those skills are not part of any of those curriculums and the licensure required to be recognized to conduct those activities. It requires knowledge, training, and certification specifically, not just a university degree or x years on the job. Of course, it’s not the sort of distinction that the general public understands by “engineering” since the public kind of just takes the act of technical risk management for granted.

Conversely, it’s perhaps also why the number of engineers with hands-on skills is shockingly lower than we expect: using technology is not on the engineering curriculum.

But yeah, just because the general public confuses technical skills with engineering doesn’t give you, lacking all three of : an accredited engineering degree, an engineering licence, and perhaps most importantly, malpractice insurance, licence to call yourself an engineer.

The boot camp morons usually don’t make it past six months in my experience

Not following this one. Are we talking about dual booting or is this some military thing that I’m too non-combatant to understand?

I’m not against bootcamps, but there are so many caveats.

1. Most bootcamp instructors have no business teaching. They have no qualifications for it, and rarely have the experience to teach the subject matter.

2. Many bootcamps are owned by agencies or companies looking for cheap labour, with many making false promises on employment - because they give them a temporary contract to get cheap devs. It was painful to see so many bootcamp grads last year, entering an empty market.

3. They are often very expensive, to the point where I’ve worked with people woefully unqualified, who put up with so much shit because they’re in debt. They were promised a career, only to be taught just enough to do basic tasks in React, and then being limited in what they can do.

4. You end up with a horrendous amount of imposter syndrome, in an industry where people already feel like frauds.

5. I’m in the UK, and you wouldn’t believe how many people go to bootcamps and assume we’re all making £100k salaries. Hell, where I live, I regularly get roles for senior engineers that are £40k a year. A woman I used to work with gave up her £30k a year job to be a front-end developer for £20k, with zero benefits, no union, etc.

Computer science is not engineering. Neither is software engineering.