As I prepare to head out for a morning gig, I take a moment to thank Goddess that my formative years as a programmer predated the masculinization of the discipline, when programmers didn't claim to be engineers and Java wasn't a thing.
@beadsland "programmers didn't claim to be [software] engineers"
what's the difference?
@LottieVixen All the difference in the world.
A programmer is someone who writes instructions for a computer to read, the work of programming being that of language, not math.
An engineer is someone with a duty to the public trust, regulated by jurisdictional licensure and subject to special forms of liability arising from the public interests their profession serves.
Software engineer (sic) is title inflation—whereby one arrogates the esteem of the public trust, without being beholden to it.
@beadsland @LottieVixen that's why I say I'm a programmer, rather than software engineer: even though a lot of programming stuff *should* be done with regulations and liability, it's often not!
The regulation and liability side of things have become more readily apparent in recent years. One must never forget, however, the other side of the distinction: programming is not math.
Programming instruction has been largely held captive by maths academia, but programming is about the marshaling of language, doing things with words.
We owe the erroneous association of programming with math to industry masculinization. It arose as a gendered gatekeeping function.
A reminder of how we got here:
Echos of personality profiles selecting for "disinterest in people" are heard in former Googler's memo citing women's "stronger interest in people" as justification for lack of representation in tech.
Along the same lines, making programming instruction contingent on maths amounts to a "fake geek girl" test. If you didn't become a "software engineer" by way of college-level calculus, you have no right to be here.
@beadsland @LottieVixen @lizardsquid i don't doubt this is a reality, though i observe that i'm a gainfully employed "software engineer" (a programmer, a sysadmin, a hacker, by no means actually an engineer) with a history degree and a distinct incapacity for any serious amount of maths.
i'm sure this might bounce me out of google employment, but it certainly hasn't hindered me much in industry.
i harbor a suspicion it would have hindered me a lot more if i weren't white/male/american.
@lizardsquid @LottieVixen @beadsland ...but then i suppose that was your point. :)
@brennen @lizardsquid @LottieVixen
I harbor a suspicion that your suspicion—concerning the ways privilege might work to circumvent gatekeeping—is well founded.
@lizardsquid @beadsland Personally I've never used SE, because I didn't think there was a difference until now, but now I'm set on Programmer :3
Also I agree with you Lizard