Am I an engineer?

The most appropriate heading would be "Are software engineers really engineers??". I'll get to that in a minute. According to Wikipedia:

Engineers apply established principles drawn from mathematics and science in order to develop economical solutions to technical problems. The work of engineers is the link between perceived social needs and commercial applications. Engineers consider many factors when developing a new product.

There in another word, CRAFT... according to the Wikipedia again:

A craft is a skill, especially involving practical arts. It may refer to a trade or particular art.Crafts practiced by independent artists working alone or in small groups are often referred to as studio craft.

The only thing that distinguishes craft from engineering is objective logic and intuition. There is no place in engineering for the "feel good" factor. It just a simple cold manifestation of science in a practical form, which in turn is just simplified mathematics represented in language understandable by humans.

So why is software development a feat of engineering? and not a craft?
Now there is nothing wrong with it being a craft. New craftsmen are trained by a master craftsman (something like internship/co-op).. they mimic everything the master does to achieve the end result. This works for general arts and used to work for medical science too few decades ago. So if you were to learn software development as a craft from the "experienced" developers, you would mimic everything they do... even if it involved throwing a dead frog after declaring each variable in a file, and it will not lead to a catastrophe until you are copying everything that the master developer does.

Advancement in technology has given so much slack to us "Computer scientists/engineers" that we do not evaluate the consequences of our action. We do not look at a problem as an engineer in other field would. Take an electronic or mechanical engineer for an instance. How many time have you known that they designed a system that failed or had a bug? Bugs are a commonplace in software engineering. Infact it is widely acknowledged that a shipped software will have bugs.. then there will be an upgrade or a patch released to fix that bug.. and then another..and another ...and so on. This is mostly due to the fact that most software rarely effect human life... but when a "crafty" software developer does write a such a software, we are in for some serious trouble.

Not all the software development fraternity works this way. There are certain organization that are required to develop 99.9% bug free software or risk loosing a million dollars or a million lives. NASA is one such company, a bug in code would mean loss of over a billion dollars.. and guess what! they don't do version upgrades on space vehicles. It does what it is supposed to do. No one is perfect though, the MARS land rover running Linux had a small race condition and that had jeopardized the whole multi billion dollar project... and imagine the mental state of the computer programmers who had the whole world looking over their shoulders, ready to point fingers should anything go wrong. Fortunately they recovered with minor losses. Boeing is another one, from auto pilot to auto land, everything depends on the software... a small bug would not only cause the death of many lives aboard the plane, but would also lead to the destruction of the multi million dollar equipment. Forget the biggies, the real time and embedded software developers are also better engineers because their software control the expensive machineries. Then we have the financial developers like Bloomberg... the whole money making fraternity depends on them, from Goldman Sachs to JP Morgan. A simple miscalculation can lead to a loss of billions of dollars.

I am an engineer/scientist by education, but its my profession that will decide what I really am;an engineer, a scientist, a blue collared programmer or a craftsman. After all as Batman said..

It's not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me.