What is Software Engineering?

Home / 2025 / 05 / 30

In Bjarne Stroustrup: C++ | Lex Fridman Podcast #48, Bjarne talks about that he wants certain (safety critical) systems to be programmed by trained engineers. Not just any programmer.

That makes me again think of the term "engineer". What does it mean? I have a feeling that the current use of the word like "DevOps Engineer" or "Prompt Engineer" is not making the word justice.

I vaguely remember a talk by Alan Kay where he said something like the engineers motto is "the bridge should not collapse". And that an equivalent in software engineering could be "the program should not crash".

That ties into systems thinking. To design systems that will not crash, you have to think at the system level. Is that software engineering?