You know how sometimes you see a post on LinkedIn about your industry and the person’s take is SO BAD, you’re still thinking about it three days later?
Three days ago I saw a post on LinkedIn where the person was saying that you don’t need a CTO in your technology business startup, because you can just teach yourself to code, and then you can be your own CTO.
I’m going to take the energy I feel about that and turn it into something positive. Specifically, although we talk about “coders”, and “developing software”, it’s very common to call someone who builds software professionally a “software engineer”. Why?
Because building software is not just about coding. I can build a bridge, if I don’t care that it falls down. In order to build a bridge that stays up for 100, 200 years, I need to know how to engineer a bridge.
I’m hoping that analogy is enough… Although there is no mandated professional association for software professionals in the UK or elsewhere, the profession of building software is an engineering discipline where people learn how to build stuff that doesn’t fall apart on first use.