Claim◆Article · 4:32 — 6:12

Software engineering earns the right to be called 'engineering' because of the rigor it demands.

After interviewing ~20 professionals across traditional and software engineering for The Crossover Project, Hillel Wayne concluded that the rigor required in software engineering justifies the title of 'engineer.' ✦ AI generated

Hillel Wayne · The Pragmatic Engineer · 2026-07-29 · original ↗

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After thorough research, Hillel has an answer. For The Crossover Project, Hillel interviewed ~20 people in different fields of traditional engineering and software engineering, and found plenty of similarities and differences. He concluded that the rigor needed in software engineering means we earn the right to the title of 'engineer.'

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✳ The Crossover Project ◉ Hillel Wayne

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Context · 1

People that run businesses understand that people make mistakes. They never will forgive software for making a mistake.Bill McDermott · No Priors · conf 60%

Counterpoint · 1

Formal methods require too much effort for the exotic edge cases they catch — even a simple file-line-counting problem becomes a nightmare to specify.Hillel Wayne · The Pragmatic Engineer · conf 70%

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gives example → Amazon used TLA+ to find a bug whose shortest error trace was 35 steps — a bug that would have been impossible to find through conventional testing.Hillel Wayne · The Pragmatic Engineer extends → Coding (producing code text) and software engineering are fundamentally different disciplines, so AI fluency at generating code doesn't mean AI is good at software engineering.Jeremy Howard · Machine Learning Street Talk extends → Most engineers should adopt property-based testing and stop there — it is the most practical lightweight formal method.Hillel Wayne · The Pragmatic Engineer