Definitions and demographics

Abstract

Who are software engineers? Answering this question properly, by defining the profession clearly and counting practitioners accurately, will help all software engineers. Practitioners will better understand the career paths that are available. Managers will better understand the jobs that employees fill. Researchers will better predict how the field will evolve. The software engineering community will better understand its identity and will better wield its influence. And, everyone will be able to make more responsible distinctions between who is and is not a software engineer.In the first section, I propose a definition of software engineers as those who focus primarily on software development and who have some depth and breadth of experience in the process, and I propose a scaling model of software engineering demographics. In the second section, I discuss the difficulty of distinguishing between software engineers and non-engineers. I believe that credentials will evolve to help clarify this distinction. And in the third section, I call for a new demographic study tailored to the needs of software engineers. This study should create a complete portrait of the field.I also respond to several criticisms of A Whole New Kind of Engineering: I explain why I believe that in 1998, about 1,000,000 software engineers existed in the U.S. and why software engineers do not need computer science or even technical degrees to prove themselves today, though this will surely change in the future.

References

1. Samuel C. Florman (1996) The Introspective Engineer, St. Martin's Griffin.
2. Steve McConnell (1999) After the Gold Rush, Microsoft Press.
3. L. B. S. Raccoon (2000) A Whole New Kind of Engineering, in Software Engineering Notes, Volume 25, Number 1, Pages 109 to 113, January 2000, ACM Press.
4. Karen Rothermel, Curtis R. Cook, Margaret M. Burnett, Justin Schonfeld, T. R. G. Green, and Gregg Rothermel (2000) WYSIWYT Testing in the Spreadsheet Paradigm: An Empirical Evaluation, in Proceeding of the 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering, Pages 230 to 239, ACM Press.