In most Europe, Engineering is always a 5 years (masters) degree,
oriented to big project developers who'll (supposedly) lead teams. I've
heard it's different in the Anglosaxon systems.
Whoa! :o
Shit, I'm going to go on a big tangent here, but I'm very surprised to
again hear that notion that the 5 year CS/Engineering degrees in Europe
are for "big project developers who'll (supposedly) lead teams.".
In my university (which, btw, is widely regarded as the best
technical/engineering school in Portugal), that idea was often mentioned
by some of the "senior" students in my degree. The details of their
opinions varied, but generally some of them seemed to think that our
graduates would soon become project managers and/or software architects
in the workforce, whereas most of the programming and grunt work would
be left to the "trolhas": the lowly developers who took the subprime 3
year "practical" courses in other universities/polytechnics. ("Trolha"
is Portuguese slang for a bricklayer, or also any guy who does
construction work... see the metaphor here?)
Obviously I found this whole idea to be complete nonsense. Not that I
didn't agree that the CS/E graduates from our degree were much better
(on average) than the graduates from those 3 or 4 year CS/E courses, but
rather the stupid notion that it would be perfectly fine (and ideal) for
a software team to have one or two good software engineers as project
leaders/managers/architects, and the rest to be "code monkeys"... These
seniors students were completely blind to the importance of having the
majority of your developers be good, smart developers (even if junior
ones).
One or two of such seniors even went so far as to comment that
programming itself was a lowly task, for "trolhas" only... we the
Engineers might program in the first 2-3 years after entering the
workplace, but we would gradually move to a architure/design role in
enterprise and soon would not need program anymore... [end of quote, and
you could feel in these comments how much this guy really disliked
programming... ]
Man, my eyes went cartoonishly wide open when I read this. How
incredibly deluded this guy was... :S
But the whole surprising thing is, I wasn't expecting this kind of
attitude in other countries, I thought this was somewhat isolated in
Portugal... a mix of personal delusion (derived from the fact that
actually these guys sucked at programming, or anything else useful),
combined with a still lingering non-meritocratic class arrogance in
Portuguese society. Nobility may be long gone, but there are a lot of
people in Portugal who like to put themselves about other people, and
having a degree (especially with title-conferring degrees, which
engineering degrees are btw) is a very common excuse for people trying
to make themselves look superior, (even if their degree was crappy, or
they sucked at it).
Well, I am not sure you got what I meant. What I said is not that
engineers will never code or won't have to after a couple years. The idea
is more that engineers will be able to have people with different skills
to manage, or to work closely with, so they'll have to know many fields to
understand the whole thing. And I was not talking specifically about
computers, but about all kinds of engineering. Engineering is about
understanding and developping projects as a whole, which doesn't exclude
working also on the details.
Of course, many engineers may end doing different things, which is another
advantage of the generalist approach. I'm actually doing websites now!