A webmaster who has become proficient at CGI scripts to do simple tasks might also be able to design an enterprise-wide software strategy, but it's not something we'd assume from knowing they are a webmaster. Most of us here at the Monastery can take potshots at particular bits of how PM works, but it's gods like you who have the whole picture.

An engineer is someone who understands how a complex group of things built from a diverse set of materials work in conjunction with each other and who is capable of designing and planning a system that will safely perform the functions it needs to. I'd say some programmers could be described the same way.

Okay, so if the important part of being an engineer is the safe design and synthesis of an object as a whole from diverse materials, then a general contractor is an engineer while a carpenter or a drywaller isn't.

If I were nitpicky, I'd ask if a semiconductor engineer were really a craftsman, because he's expected to be good at designing and creating chips, using primarily the single material of silicon and a few transistors.

I think what you're really trying to say is "Engineers design complex things and craftsmen don't." That's a fair opinion. I completely disagree, but I think it's much closer to your opinion than the silly metaphors I dragged you to. :)

the silly metaphors I dragged you to. :)

:-)

I don't use these metaphors just to play with words, I am trying to forumlate arguments that can be used in situations where management is making decisions without consulting technical staff. In such cases I will say something along the lines of "You can plan a bridge building project without consulting the metal-workers, but if you plan it without consulting the engineers, remind me not to drive over that bridge."

Let me be specific: I believe that the source code is the design. Compiling is the manufacturing. Engineering is, what, measuring the tensile strength of a stable quicksort algorithm?

I think it is a serious mistake to equate code with design. Granted, an agile methodology intermixes design and coding in an iterative and mutually informing process, and the final code (and documentation) may be the only tangible artifact produced, but that still does not mean the code *is* the design.

As for engineering, yes there certainly is engineering in software development, running the gamut from the ad-hoc or experiential engineering that any builder / tinker / craftsman etc might display, to algorithm analysis, to the design of language features that increase assertions of correctness (within particular domains of correctness).

I think it is a serious mistake to equate code with design.

Why?

The code is the product, not the design. It is rather easy to think of code as a design or blueprint for a compiler, but a compiler (or interpreter) doesn't *build* a software product from a blueprint, it merely translates it a software product (the source code) from a human readable/executable representation into a machine readable/executable representation. Machine code is still just code after all, there is nothing more *product* like about it above and beyond the source code it was compiled from.