John Theune wrote:

As part of this thread I started looking in to the licensing of
Engineers and looking at the national standards I saw that there is no
licensing of the software engineering field. The closest I could find
was Electrical and Computer Systems but that was 70 directed to the
electrical aspects of designing the hardware with a small ( 30%) amount
devoted to software itself. It would seem that NCEES thinks software
is important enough to test for but not to license as a separate
category. Perhaps this will change but given that this board equates
surveying with engineering make me question just how relevant they are.


Well, when you consider that virtually everything we use today
involves software it is a dsicipline in its own right. It is a
vitally important component of any engineering process from design
and development, modeling, simulation, manufacturing, process control
(a pilot could not fly an F117 without the software systems), testing
and on and on.

I've designed and developed both analog and digital hardware and
written the software to support it. I started out in hardware
and eventually over the years gravitated into software development
because (at least where I have worked) good software engineers
were always in high demand. Understanding the CPU architecture
is important to designing an efficient solution to any problem.

The same engineering principles apply whether you are designing
a software system or a hardware system and the best designs
involve a proper division of both disciplines, because most
most software is controlling or sensing some sort of hardware,
or interfacing with humans or other systems. Software is
very diverse and can be extremely low level (micro-coded devices),
mid level (operating systems and device drivers) and high level
(applications).

Software engineering in terms of design and developing systems
is engineering (whether anyone likes it or not). Writing a few
macros for a spreadsheet is not engineering.... but that isn't
what were were talking about.