I prefer to reserve the term engineer for people with math and science degrees. If a vibe coder is an engineer then so is a pool boy.
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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I'll be honest, I don't even call myself a software engineer. Programmer is the better way, engineering comes with the baggage of breing able to confirm that your work won't fall appart in the next X years. You can't really confirm that in software.
Formal methods, and few dependencies.
You'd then be shocked by how many students at my university (in engineering btw) who simply take the assignment at hand, put it in chatGPT and submits it.
I half worry for society and half feel that as much as I feel bad about my coding abilities, I'm better than people who never actually bother learning the concepts themselves and fully outsource their homework to AI and that population is growing. It's a low bar but more people are failing to clear it every day!
Is you comment an attempt to undermine the value of a degree?
The students themselves are doing it, it's not the commenter's fault.
From the high school and university teachers I've talked to, AI is commonly used and it actively undermines their learning.
It's a pretty new tech so many schools don't have a solid policy on its use. It's a mess
No, my intention wasn't to undermine the value of a degree. I'm saying most people priorities for getting a degree, more specifically an engineering degree, is to just have a pay check. On a more related note, there's a lot of "engineering majors" that use artificial intelligence to code, who don't actually enjoy the process of learning at my uni.
So yea, at the rate of adoption and use of generative AI at my school, a pool boy can do what most of the sophomore engineers do.
Labor is loved whether pool boy, math whiz, engineer or programmer. Do cool stuff. Maybe we can learn to love vibe coders some day.
Handstands are cool. I can't hold a handstand for very long, but it still gets attention. Short handstands are vibe coding. Cool-ish, but not as cool as holding it longer.
Yeah that's fine, except for the vibe coder part we should treat those liabilities harshly, but a guy who collects leaves from pool gutters probably shouldn't be designing bridges, buildings, heart monitors, or even pools for that matter.
Go have fun hand-laboring yourself.
What an immature POV. A lot of engineers don’t have a science or math degrees
They should. An engineering degree is literally a Bachelor of Science.
I really don't get the point of gatekeeping a job title.
There's no official license or certification for software engineering in the US, so anyone claiming you have to meet some requirement to call yourself a software engineer is factually wrong. Now, pretty much every tech company calls anyone who writes code some form of engineer, so much so that SDE/SWE is a pretty universal acronym.
I really don't care personally, and I don't go around grouping myself in with other engineering fields. But for the past 7 or so years, my actual job title has had the word "engineer" in it despite the fact that I don't have a Bachelor's degree. I feel like jumping through hoops to say, "well, my official title is Software Engineer, but technically I'm a programmer" is just pedantic and probably more confusing for most people.
I could see an argument for differentiating between those who participate heavily in the design and evolution of an entire codebase (as opposed to those who just pull tickets and write code), but even that has kind of just evolved into the junior/mid/senior/etc terminology.
The P.Eng society is working on this, so that only actual engineers can use the title engineer. Software “engineers” should just be called code monkeys.
It many countries, like Germany, engineer is a protected designation, just like doctor.
The P.Eng society is working on this, so that only actual engineers can use the title engineer.
Which is why I specified I was talking about the US. Also, fair. If the term ever actually has a clear set of requirements, then of course it would be incorrect to claim the title without meeting those requirements.
Software “engineers” should just be called code monkeys.
I hope you realize how elitist this comes across. I've worked with a lot of contractors, web developers, etc. that have a strong understanding of software development and are able to author software really well. I would be so embarrassed if they knew I referred to them as "code monkeys". Something tells me that you're the kind of person I'm very grateful to have never had the misfortune of working with.
If you don't know math then you should not be engineering anything, period.
Not having a degree doesn't mean they don't know math.
And not having a degree doesn't mean they don't know medicine, either. Is it your opinion that we should deregulate hospitals, too?
Engineers use math and know math. That doesn't mean they have math degrees. They have engineering degrees. Of which math courses are a part.
Moreover, most people with actual math and science degrees explicitly are not engineers.
Semantics but I would argue an Engineering Degree is a Math and Science Degree.
we should deregulate hospitals, too
You do realize that the term "software engineer" isn't regulated, right? There's no test, no license, no bar/board. Unlike doctors, who are required by law to have a medical license.
Some countries do regulate the term "Engineer" which is the way it should be, imo.
It is
To be more specific, in the US, it is definitely not.
No, but programming is not engineering.
Then they're not engineers, no shame in that...
Yeah, let's pretend the vibe-coder creates praiseworthy code when everything is working...
No no, it makes sense when you consider the reaction of the praising person when they have to review the PR.
There are some codebases my job forces me to work in that would probably make me rage quit without AI. In this situation, using AI is like wearing a rubber suit when working in a sewer. For all practical purposes, I can’t really do it without AI, though I could build something really awesome without AI to replace it if I were allowed.