Traditional engineering involves more than talking to people, teams, and trade offs.

Where I live the engineering society here does license software engineers now and enforces the term, "Software Engineer," as a protected term. You can't just call yourself a software engineer. You have to have educational credentials, pass exams, and be licensed. You have to keep up with your educational requirements. You have to be insured.

It boils down to the same thing, people and teams, but the difference is liability.

Personally I think we're better off pair programming with actual people than GenAI chat bots. We get to teach each other and learn together which improves our skills. We actually need to socialize and be around people to remain healthy. You miss out on all of these benefits with chat bots.

And there's growing evidence that you don't learn as much when using them [0].

Consider when using them is appropriate and maybe don't rely on them for everything.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

> ... "Software Engineer," as a protected term. You can't just call yourself a software engineer.

In my irrelevant opinion, this is good. To me at least, the word engineer represents someone with a big, heavy responsibility on their hands.

I never liked being called an engineer and only have it on my resume because that's the keyword recruiters search on linkedin nowadays. One reason is that I don't have formal education. The other is that, in almost 15 years of experience, I witnessed very few occasions of software receiving proper care to the extent that I could call it "engineering".

Thank fucking god. I have been advocating for this for years, I'm glad some engineering societies are actually doing it.

I'm curious, which country or region does this licensing? I'd like to learn more.