Which Are You: Developer VS Engineer VS PROFESSIONAL Engineer

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all right it's the drive to work been trying to figure out why my camera wasn't working because it's plugged into the USB charger in this phone it's trying to do like a it's prompting me for media transfer and I don't have the the screen on because I trying to do a the job of explaining that I'm not watching my camera as I'm driving here um on that note there's no spot like there's no GPS in this car so I have to use my phone but there's no spot for it so it's in the cup holder the cup holder is here so if you see me looking here it's because I'm literally trying to use my GPS that's all I got um I also realized it's going to be crappy CU When I go to park at the office I'm going to like I don't pull

into spots ever in any vehicle I always back in but there's no backup camera in this thing and the mirrors are absolute trash too so I uh I have to pull into a spot and I'm not excited about that but um man this intersection is garbage right now this person oh no they figured it out they figured it out it looked like they were trying to give me the right away but they just don't know how to pull up to the uh the turn properly so that's fun um okay so I'm probably going to break this into two parts Let's uh do the drive home with a separate flavor of this sorry there's a police cruiser that's like oh he's going through the intersection there's a lot going on right now um I'm if you watch this morning's video I don't know some people are

just you know randomly jumping onto videos that's fine um in this morning's video I said I wanted to do a bit of a rant on the drive to work which is right now um but I was thinking about this like I I don't just want to rant and like then it's like a toxic thing I want to like get some points across that I think are valid um and then I want to talk about um in the drive home unless something comes up that's uh more interesting I want to talk about uh how debates and conflict and stuff like that cuz this is sort of why this is coming up why um like people need to get better at this stuff in software engineering because um it's and I I'll explain this more in in the drive home video but uh just like a little

little teaser is that sometimes when I'm watching how people discuss and debate things on social media I get a feel for what it would be like to be trying to work on a software project with them when they disagree and I get this feeling sometimes from certain individuals that like I would absolutely hate working with this person because they are not good at uh debating and trying to to resolve conflict so um I'll talk about that more on the drive home because I have some examples which will be based on what I want to talk about on the drive 2 work which is right now so what I want to talk about is softw developer versus engineer versus professional engineer so there is a post I make through brand ghost uh which is the platform I'm building and brand ghost has uh the ability to

have like recurring posts so I have a lot of content and I will repost it uh I can't remember off the top of my head the Cadence for this one how long it takes to repeat it's months um so and I'm always adding content so that if it's say it's 3 months before you see a repeat post uh of just this uh topic stream of content by the time that 3 months is come around like I'm still adding content it might be four months right so point is that's how brand ghost works and one of the posts that I make through it is my experience on um why I chose to go to university uh to work towards becoming a software engineer and the story is essentially that uh so I grew up in Canada right now I'm not living in Canada I'm in Seattle

area but I grew up in Canada and when I was deciding hey I'm going to go to school to become an engineer I want to go become a computer engineer that was the program uh and I was trying to figure out if I wanted to be an engineer for for computer hardware or for software right I'm trying to figure that out I'm going to be an engineer in Canada and this specifically in Ontario if you want to be an engineer if you want to say I am an engineer you need to go I don't and I'm driving I don't have this stuff memorized this so if someone's watching this and you're like oh you're wrong and you're getting mad um watch the next video after so we can chat more about this but um from what I recall what's required in Ontario Canada to be

an engineer is you need to go to an accredited University so number one you must go to university and not just any University that's offering an engineering program or a computer science program you must go to an accredited one with an engineering program okay so they have already standardized who is allowed to be able to instruct people that will be going to become engineers part two and I could have this part wrong regarding the exact requirements in terms of the length but you need to have four years of work experience under a professional engineer so even if you go to an accredited school and graduate like I did I don't have four years of work experience that are documented under a professional engineer so according to Ontario I am not a professional engineer I can not call myself an engineer in Ontario Canada okay this

is again if these have changed over time then that's like I don't know and I don't have it memorized but this is what it has been when I was going through this so I'm just I'm trying to state things that are not my opinion like I'm not saying I want this I'm telling you this is why I made the decisions I made right so those are two requirements the next part is that you also have to pass an ethics test and the ethics test I've never taken so that's another reason why I'm not a professional engineer the ethics test is apparently pretty ridiculous and I think it's kind of funny because when I was going through school they had like ethics classes that we would take we would do these like ethics things on our internships and it's kind of funny because to me it

seemed pretty obvious like I don't know like it almost seemed like common sense but uh even towards the end I started to realize like they're basically they're putting you in these like these situations that seem like they're completely they seem like they're in like a movie right where you're like okay literally both options people are going to die and they're like which one's ethically the better choice you're like man like what the hell am I supposed to say here I literally can't see into my blind spot so merging onto the highway is already a pain in the butt um so like the ethics part is apparently really hard I've never taken the test but apparently it's pretty grueling so I don't even know if there's more beyond that but those are three things and I've like this is I graduated from school 12 years ago

and it's been 12 years and I've only done the school part I have not got the documented work experience under a professional and I've never taken the ethics test I cannot legally call myself an engineer in Ontario Canada that's what my post was about that's why I went into what I did and that's why I took the path I did now I am very vocal about the fact fact that I do not think that that necessarily makes someone better at being a software developer because the first wave of things that come in are I don't I didn't go to university or so and so didn't go to university and they make amazing software and I'm going yeah like I believe you I've seen that you know what else like I'm not a professional engineer and nearly every single person I've worked with is not a

professional engineer and we've made some pretty Kick-Ass software like yeah I'm not saying it's not possible that's not that's literally not what I'm debating it's not the same thing so I am not trying to tell people that you must have professional designation in order to write good software not my claim because even for myself I think I've written some pretty good stuff in my day I've seen other people that have written some pretty good stuff in their day and they're not Professional Engineers so I would be very hypocritical if I said you must be a professional engineer to write good software it's absolutely not required now I think where this gets confusing there's a couple of different levels here one is that the regulations aren't the same everywhere and to give you an example someone was commenting and saying actually like in Alberta in Canada

they they actually changed it so that uh that software Engineers can use engineer in their title without the professional designation so there's even in Canada an exception to it okay so that's that's part of it I should also mention there's a historical reason that someone else pointed out to me in Canada uh which is why we have this so before I continue on let me kind of jump back to this I don't wear it anymore because uh from bodybuilding when I put weight on and lose weight um we have iron Rings it's a Canadian engineering thing and they're not iron they're just like stainless steel um but the idea behind the iron ring is that there was this bridge and I can't remember the exact story a bridge in Quebec that um that was built and it collapsed and killed people and I think they

they had problems with it like two more times like redesigned collapsed again like basically it was a show like just like I don't again I don't know the details I don't want to like be like it was this guy and he messed it all up but like just like an engineering disaster and I thought from like I even went to school and they gave us iron Rings well stainless steel rings in like this ceremony and I thought that the significance of that story was just for the ring but it's not it's actually and someone pointed this out so this is one of the great things about social media someone pointed this out and they said hey uh that that bridge disaster in Quebec is actually what caused a lot of these standards to be created in Canada so there were some significant events and in

Canada they said look we need to have a standardized system for engineers so that there is accountability so I'm not a professional engineer and I don't want to get this wrong but my understanding is that Professional Engineers can literally lose their designation and be held accountable when things go wrong so if you were a civil engineer and you signed off on things as an as a professional engineer and that resulted in someone uh being hurt dying multiple people being hurt and dying like you could be held accountable for that because you are the engineer that approved it guess what other Engineers do this civil engineers mechanical engineers other Engineers do this they are held accountable could you imagine in software if there was a bug and something bad happened if someone came to you and then said like you're going to you'll never be able

to practice engineering again like hey you broke the build and as a result that delayed things that cost millions of dollars and like guess you'll never develop software again in your life no no software engineer is going to sign up for that so going back to why I think there's some some weird stuff going on here is number one I think like employers set the titles so an employer will say hey we're hiring software Engineers will hire you regardless of professional designation or not and this is like again I think it's fine based on the work that we're doing as software developers like that's why I'm saying I don't care if you went to a boot camp if you're selftaught you went to University doesn't matter like you can write good software but companies are labeling the position as software engineer so because we have

this in Industry where companies are giving the title that is now in a bit of conflation with these professional like these organizations that are trying to have a standardized designation of engineer so it's kind of weird uh I think I mentioned the other part was uh jurisdictions so different parts I mentioned the Alberta example is different from Ontario um some people were saying like hey in the US we can just call ourselves Engineers it's no worries um and then I was like well that seems kind of like to me because if I did like a a two second search on Google like I can see that there's like professional designation that's very similar like you need an ethics test you need blah blah blah this work experience and they were saying no no no here's the difference we can call ourselves engineers we can't call

ourselves Professional Engineers interesting okay so like where else does this happen could you imagine being like going to your doctor and then finding out like oh oh no sorry I'm a doctor I'm not a professional doctor though right it's it's very weird and again I'm going to keep repeating this because so many people were missing my point talking about this in that example someone could be a very good doctor and not be a professional I don't know I still that would make me feel very uneasy because it's my life but the same thing with software development right like you you don't need to have the professional designation to make good software now what I don't know and I haven't seen stats on is if you did have the professional designation are there metrics that suggest that we would have better software I don't know I'm

assuming probably not um and it would be hard to do but like again we have so many examples of the opposite of people that are selftaught going to boot camps whatever whatever happens to be and they're building amazing software so I I don't I don't even know right it seems kind of weird to even try and go prove that okay then we get in the comments we get people saying things like well um man I had it in my head sorry and I'm forgetting it uh this is the problem with ranting and then doing it live I can't like edit it out cu you're seeing me like getting all heated and then being like I don't know what I'm talking about anymore that's what happens when you get heated though like your brain stops working um okay so oh there were um I'm trying to

think there was okay there were people chiming in saying that it's actually the same in in their country so they were saying hey like that works the exact same way here I think someone was saying in Nigeria that's how it works someone was saying in Italy it works the same way um there was someone was trying to suggest that like that engineering is not reg like cuz there's a lot of comparisons that people are trying to do with um they medical doctors because it's a regulated profession there's someone driving behind me without headlights so it looks to me like when I look up it looks like there's no one on the road behind me but it's because there's a car that's black blocking everything these guys are so stupid it's raining out pretty heavy and you got idiots like this driving on the highway with

no lights like I don't know how people make it this far anyway um so oh he turned his lights on he figured it out he's probably like why can't I see literally anything it's because you're stupid and you don't have lights on so in the example between engineers and medical doctors the like both of these are regulated like Professional Engineers it's regulated there is a very high standard for ethics I explained all the requirements and there were there was someone that was trying to say like oh engineering isn't regulated at all and it's like no no you're missing it you're missing the whole point it is regulated it's extremely heavily regulated but no one's abiding by it and it's because all of the companies are just saying we're hiring software engineers and not not doing anything about it the governing bodies aren't able to do

it right like a professional engineer is a it's a it's absolutely a regulated designation so um I feel like some people were trying to make arguments like this and it's like what I don't know what the point of the argument is supposed to be I'm I can give you literally and I was I was like giving screenshots of like professional engine in society and like here's literally pictures of all the requirements to illustrate why it's regulated and how it's regulated and then they're saying well no it's not a regulated thing no my entire sort of point that I'm trying to get across here is that it is 100% a regulated thing and that I find it very interesting that as software developers we're the only engineers that can go around and basically have no uh accountability truly as Engineers like I'm fine with it I'm

not a professional engineer like don't misunderstand what I'm saying I just find it fascinating that we get to be this exception seems weird to me and it seems wrong Works in my favor or else I wouldn't be working and then I had people saying no it's only like was it it was like it's only very small um a small like percentage or small I don't know what the word is uh scope of things where you can be uh like where this is applicable and I'm like okay like I I told you what the scope is I told you the scope that's relevant to me literally in the original post was like I from Ontario Canada there's your scope if you want to say yeah it's only a small part great if it doesn't apply to you like move the hell on I don't know what

to tell you you're trying to make an argument out of something that's not applicable to you okay I never like I never said it was I literally told you who it's applicable to so I don't know I find it fascinating right so um again all of this to say that uh my choices for like cuz people like the reason I I wanted to write about this was people ask me and they say like do I need to go to college or university do I need to do this do I need to do that um the thing I'm going to rant about on the drive home is related to college and university uh which again I don't think that you have to go do I know plenty of people that did not go to school like postsecondary education uh for like at all or for computer

science or like software engineering type things I know plenty of people and they've been very successful um but it would be negligent of me to try and tell someone that like uh like oh it's not necessary if they wanted to be a professional engineer like it it would be negligent if I said hey like no no you're good being selftaught or going to boot camp and then they're like great like I can't wait to get my professional designation because like that's what I wanted that's what I wanted because that's what I wanted to be able to do in Ontario Canada it turns out in Ontario Canada you literally don't need it anyway as a software developer and what happens in Ontario Canada is that companies will have software engineer positions and I might have this wrong now in terms of the terminology but they're not

literally the Professional Engineers of Ontario would go around to companies that had software engineer positions and they would say if you're not hiring Professional Engineers you need to change the job title they're literally enforcing it so you could say things like software engineering like the like this is a you were that's what you're performing like that's a verb uh or man I got to move over and there's no there's no room these freaking mirrors are terrible oh my god um or they just have to call them software developers because like guess what that's what they are like by definition they're not Professional Engineers but like this is the industry standards that we're calling them Engineers again I'm going to say it I'm not saying that like that's how it has to be or that's like I'm just saying that like by the definitions that are

there that's what it's supposed to be so in Ontario it is enforced so yes it would be negligent of me to tell someone hey you don't need that if they wanted to follow a similar path to what I was hoping to follow now at this point in my life there's not a lot of push to be become actually a licensed professional engineer and the reason is because I have so many other things going on even just my career alone like my my work at Microsoft there's so much to focus on that there is no benefit there is no direct benefit to me becoming a licensed professional engineer it's just more work it's just more work it's more accountability it's more liability it costs every year to maintain your membership the organization it's just more work so I'm not going to pursue it any further however

like to me it's a side quest if I didn't have a bunch of other stuff going on right like if I if I won the lottery and I didn't have to work like I didn't I would still work because I like to work but if I didn't have to and now like most of my problems go away because most problems are money problems that we stress about like for example like we live in a house but it's not the house that I want to live in for forever it's not a great neighborhood that I'm happy with like it's a house I can't complain but in my life I would like a nicer house in a nicer neighborhood there's a limit because I've seen some really big crazy houses I don't need that I don't want that but I want the next step up like I

want that and that hasn't changed for years so I have that in mind but like that's a problem that could easily be solved with money so if I don't have to be stressing about you know money income streams I don't want to be I don't want to be in a position where I have to work the rest of my life I want to be in a position that I can work on anything I want for the rest of my life that's my goal so if I'm in that position would it be fun and fulfilling to go pursue being a licensed professional engineer hell yeah I think that would be super cool and why no reason except for that's what I wanted to do when I was a kid when I figured out I was going to University to do this that was my goal it

would feel very fulfill for me to be able to do that it has nothing to do with the fact that I could go say aha yes now I can go apply to these uh software engineering roles and truly call myself the engineer all of you are phonies no like literally completely unrelated so again uh I just I wanted to bring awareness that depending on where you are and how you talk about software engineering it can mean different things so if you want to be able to truly call yourself a professional software engineer I'm sorry but boot camps and self-taught and any professional engineering designation I've seen are not are not sufficient and like I said at the beginning of this video there are there are University programs that that seem like they're relevant like a computer science program and even if it's not accredited to

become an engineer then it's not applicable but that's if you want the professional designation the reality is in practice and this is sort of the meta Point here to take away is in practice it literally doesn't matter because uh I've not seen aside from those uh like the Professional Engineers of Ontario trying to get people to change the titles I have never seen in my in my time as a software developer or software engineering manager I have never seen a requirement for a professional engineer okay so that says something it's like the industry the industry is not asking for it and that's not to say that I'm sure there are positions where um they are trying to do that like I'm I'm just making up examples because again I don't have proof I could imagine that maybe in some uh some banking roles some Health

Care roles maybe for uh military or or space related uh that they might be saying look like we're only hiring people with professional designation and it's because they want to assume and I feel like rightfully so but who knows um they want to assume that they're going to be getting individuals that are held to this bar that's standardized now again I don't have stats that say what like how effective that standardization is I don't know but um that's the goal of it I thought of one more thing that I I wanted to say because I'm I got up the highway now so I'm almost at work but um were there were people making arguments man I social media is fun um there were people saying look like this is just um how do they phrase it oh my God uh you can tell I have

a lot of fun reading comments uh I get super stressed out about it when just because I'm like I don't understand how people think but um there's some comments around like it's basically just uh organizations trying to exploit people by uh by having these standards um yeah they're trying to take advantage of people they're trying to capitalize on them they're trying to extort them was some of the phrasing um and I'm like look man like if you think that having standards is extorting people like I had to tell someone in the comments on on this post I said look now that you've kind of offered that perspective I said respectfully I I can no longer engage in a debate with you on this and I said and I and I mean this like not not in a rude way I said in my comment I

said literally I'm not trying to be rude about this but I said you've shared with me your philosophy on on the fact that you think that having standards and governing organizations like this in place um is only there to exploit people and there's no Advantage I said respectfully like I can't debate you on this because I'm not going to like if that's we're going to have a fundamental disagreement at that point so there's no possible way in our conversation that I'm going to spend effort trying to move even beyond that that's a roadblock for us to advance any discussion any further and like respectfully right like you are absolutely allowed to have that belief it's fundamentally not what I believe so there's no way that I'm going to try and persuade you out of that you know if you're like hey the sky is purple

and I'm looking at it and I'm like dude it's literally not purple it's blue or gray right now cuz it's Seattle um I'm I'm I can't I'm not going to waste time trying to tell you otherwise um what was the other thing it was basically along the same lines of that but um yeah it's like extorting and then the other thing was uh oh I already can't remember it again I got too heated and too excited about that but anyway it's interesting stuff man I can't tell how big this vehicle is I'm in the lines that's good enough cool um thanks for hanging out for the rant uh drive home is going to be similar it's going to be on some topics but I what I want to do on that one is not just talk about definitions of things again if you're watching this

and you're like hey like that definition or whatever is incorrect like I'm driving I don't I don't have the internet in front of me so it's I'm trying to do it for memory um but yeah if you want to debate this stuff in the comments go crazy I've already been doing it for a couple days now um the drive home is going to be on a similar topic um but I want to frame it so that you can apply it in engineering discussions because as I'm explaining how people are commenting on on this topic right what's happening is that people are and this is good people will share their perspective but what they're not doing at any point is being able to acknowledge someone else's perspective and that means that you you cannot move forward Ward and if you can't move forward especially in the

workplace like you're going to you'll you'll never progress on anything you're going to find like it's impossible to get architecture done designs done you have to collaborate with another team good luck um nothing moves so I think the most important thing that'll be a takeaway in the video on the drive home is like how do we how do we have conversations where we literally don't agree on the same things and we can still move forward that's going to be a hard one to talk about but I'm going to try my best so I'll see you later