You're not a software engineer; you're a "frameworker"

It's crazy how this comment is longer than the original post 😄

Giving people the title engineer just to make them feel welcome is just wrong and deceitful in my opinion. A lot of platforms have taken advantage of this to create courses like "Become an Engineer in 6 months" or "The one course you need to be a Software Engineer". A lot of people taking these courses aren't aware that these platforms aren't giving them the full picture🖼

So we can look at this post as more of enlightenment for someone. Also companies are at disadvantage too. They would hire someone with the label Engineer only to find out they can't deliver. This would also be detrimental to the individual's moral 😔

I think the software industry really needs to work on these job titles. It's better to refer to someone as react developer, django developers or Laravel developer than to throw the title Engineer to anyone who prints Hello World 🌎

Nurses aren't less than doctors. Niether are air hostesses than pilots they all play an important role in their profession but we can't call a Nurse a doctor 😷

I find it strange that we've gotten to the point where you had to feel the need to compare CSS and tailwindcss to C++ and assembly. It's absurd.

"You don't start by learning how printf works in assembly before you get going in a C++ project do you?"

... actually, if you are in 4 year Software Engineering or Computer Engineering program you do start with assembly, technically you start with 1s and 0s.

I agree we should be inclusive... the frustration this guy is showing is the same I show often, an engineer in a web developers world. Ultimately, this is HRs fault. There is an enormous difference to how an engineer solves a problem vs a web developer. Engineers are about preventing problems by reducing the seas of infinite possibilities down to manageability. Developers are about implementing whatever they are told using whatever tools available no matter what... in my experience anyway. It's a completely different mindset and approach, completely different background required.

So I agree with you both, inclusive is good, but stop trying to reinvent words that have legal definitions, include the engineers that have been defined since the dawn of the industrial revolution, and stop considering software programmers to be software engineers... so much insaine havoc I've witnessed, just because HR and staff don't understand the distinct in web. In mainframe they do, in cpu design they do, usually they do for desktop and server apps but not always... look what happened to SolarWinds, an engineer would never use password for root in security management software, give me a break, not when you have some liability. A programmer can do anything, one only needs to be sitting at a computer writing code to legally call oneself a programmer. Only definitions under the law matter to an engineer, programmers tend to be unaware of the importance of terminology, let alone will take the time to write definitions.

So... end the insanity, keep things inclusive including the world before web 2.0, dont call yourself an engineer unless you are really doing engineering... problem prevention via architecture, no problem resulting or pure implementation via hands in code.

I understand this sooo much, because it personally affects my current state of employment, I am work in an environment where the senior dev created his own library in Vanilla JavaScript which the company uses to also everything and if i am stuck because I don't fully understand the basics, I get looked at like a slacker and un-serious and the solutions aren't even online, it's really discouraging because to meet up i have to use external methods to push the pace

Thank you for this! We need more inspiring engineers like yourself. As if the juniors weren't overwhelmed enough already. Everyone I know including myself had an imposter syndrome at a certain part of their career and I know some (intelligent) people that even quit because they found the community unbearably toxic. I have contemplated the same a couple of times, especially after seeing how ruthless some devs on StackOverflow are and being massively downvoted and attacked because of a small typo myself.

You cannot have a more wrong take. He's not talking about learning to read binary before you start writing code. He's talking about people who crash platforms in production because they don't know how db indexes works after years of experience in working with ORMs only. He's talking about people who need 10 servers because they use a standard bloated framework instead of just writing a simple single file script that can run on a freaking raspberry. He's talking about people who use the pretty colored dashboard to get the status of a server but don't understand what's actually wrong with the server because guess what, the said dashboard freezes exactly when the server is overload.

Software is hard, if you can't deal with that and are not passionate enough to overcome this, stay out. You'll make everyone's life's easier, especially yours.
And toxic positivity is the worst of lies, to the point of being predatory!

Sorry but this is hilarious to me. CSS is amazing. Tailwind is a most butchered version of CSS.

"From a personal standpoint, I think CSS is an antique with bad developer ergonomics. Tailwind makes my life easier because it allows me to focus on delivering without affecting page performance."

There is this fad, in some people who have little to express by themselves, that consists in creating some kind of opponent based on some sort of fuzzy description like "people who uses frameworks but doesn't now a lot more than that", and then build an argument to come out like a winner or an expert or better than who knows because I don't know why!

C'mon, let's grab a coffee!

Just by the fact that you come here to say that "CSS is an antique with bad developer ergonomics", we can already see that you don't understand anything about the front-end, even more so to say that tailwind is something good. It's probably a backend that doesn't understand frontend basics and thinks they know something. Maybe the day you need to maintain a legacy tailwind project you'll change your mind. As the author said, in a simplified way, learn the basics before saying that library A or B is the perfect solution.

You apparently didn't understand what the author meant and preferred to choose the worst possible scenario. When he says "basic", I personally understood it, understand javascript, CSS, HTML, programming paradigms, programming principles, literally basic things, but very important to have a minimally well-built project.

You can play engineer on personal projects, but in the business world there are many consequences for those who want to do things anyway just because they think it's cool and want to see the "beauty of writing software".

I kinda agree with you but you see, what he is saying is not far from the truth. You know how to write css if an opportunity presents itself right? I think what he is trying to say is before jumping into learning of frameworks, one should actually learn the basics of programming if not how will the next generation build the next bootstrap or tailwind or the next big thing if we keep depending on frameworks and libraries.

I have seen developers learn react and stuffs without learning the rudiments of html, css or javascript and according to the writer, they want to call themselves software engineers, that is absurd. What if you are asked to work on a framework as that, do you have the skill to build that. One of our very crucial role as software developers is giving back to the community and I think that's what the author is trying to say

Could not agree more. I would like to add, it seems like such engineering mindset contributed to the fact that hiring management care more about "how system work" rather than what the jobs is actually going to look alike.

Ofc there's no doubt we shouldn't focus ourselves on one framework or a tool set, we should aim to understand the concepts behind it.

But to say there's a measure of how senior you are depending on how much you down you go is ridiculous.

I like to consider myself as UI developer not react developer but that doesn't mean I look down on people who specialize! In fact, I learn from them. My experience didn't depended high proficiency in one framework or toolset. Why would I consider myself better?

Never force people to change rather invite them. And this post is bringing no good to beginners whatsoever.

Actually the post is not made to, as you say, "assassinate interest", but otherwise to encourage people that know nothing about real programming to start learning stuff the right way to see things differently, when i first started i mastered vanilla js then moved on to react, next, svelte etc... So you shouldn't encourage people that mostly copy-paste code and don't understand how it works because that is not the way they will learn.

No there is definitely a difference between I could build a simple database if needed and I can barely use. Like a software engineer should be able to build something without a framework. Now frameworks are nice because they do cut down redundancy that you would setup otherwise but there's a decent amount of people that don't actually understand how to sue the framework properly or haven't figured out how to create a highly reusable function for something you know you are going to use a lot. With react, I made two functions that can essentially handle all of my object state updating so I all have to do is add a check and set state and it will handle it. People aren't curious about how things work and therefore they fall into redundancies and extremely large code files because they are not utilizing the language as much as they can. One may not necessarily need to understand the details from the ground up but they should be able to explain enough of the behind the scenes to be able to teach people what it is essentially doing. There is a decent amount of people that go I just write this line and it does it but idk why and that's kind of a problem if you are calling yourself a software engineer. Which mind you, has also set forward a lot of weird requirements because of how people just throw that around.

Well said, really appreciate your thoughts

Agree!

This post is incomplete without your comment. Applaud bro. Stay in love!

Thank you! You have expressed my thoughts exactly, and you did it so eloquently.

Please this should be a article

... and toggle them into the machine via front-panel switches, and reading the indicator LEDs for all your output...

00100001 00110000 00111111 00111010 00110001

😂😂😂

Wrong.

"Building" is implementation, not "Planning"... engineers plan a lot more than they implement.

You'll have to look up your state requirements if you want to legally call yourself a Professional Software Engineer, they have a checklist... 4 year abet degree, 4 year apprenticeship, 2x8 hour tests is the most common.

The grandfather clause from engineers before 1920s is why you are allowed to call yourself an engineer, but your not a professional engineer by the legal definition without a license.

Do you still know how to do that in css? Otherwise one could argue you don't know css anymore 😛 tailwind is terribly limiting in the utility classes that it outputs. Rather use something like PandaCSS where it generates utility classes based on the CSS you write, so you can do everything that CSS can do and your CSS knowledge is transferable if in the future an even better tool comes along.

.grid {
display: grid:
}

.gap-4 {
gap: 1rem;
}

IMO tailwindcss makes writing css better and reusable

I struggled to find something worth writing as a comment to the original post, I guess this might have been it.