It’s a good thing that Engineer is a protected profession and not everyone can claim it, like Lawyer or Doctor.
In the US now it’s “oh you’re an engineer? Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?”
I disagree, I believe the regulatory agencies do nothing in Canada to legitimize their claim to regulating software development. Heck, they do nothing for electronics or semiconductors or anything smaller than the power grid.
Software development is done by developers. If you are a software engineer chances are you’re working on software infrastructure that actually apply at scales that are not “add a shopping cart to this blog”.
There are reasons you ask a civil engineer for work.
If you’re a software engineer, you’re applying an engineering process to the field of software development. Adding a shopping cart to a blog can be a perfectly sound solution to the problem at hand.
Engineering becomes more important at scale, but scale itself doesn’t define engineering.
You missed my point that if professional engineering societies in Canada want to take ownership of software and electronics, they better do something and not just say they’re regulating it and sit on it with no clear definition for what it even is.
If they were doing their job, we wouldn’t need to debate what a software engineer is. They’ve let us down and they’re getting away with it.