Software engineer

A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to the design, development, maintenance, testing, and evaluation of the software and systems that make computers or anything containing software work.

Prior to the mid-1960s, software practitioners called themselves computer programmers or software developers, regardless of their actual jobs. Many people prefer to call themselves software developer and programmer, because most widely agree what these terms mean, while software engineer is still being debated. In many companies, the titles programmer and software developer were changed to software engineer, for many categories of programmers.

In May 2015, the United States U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics published an updated count of software engineers which has gone up from 760,840 in 2004 to 1,554,960 in 2015; in the same period there were some 1,610,480 practitioners employed in the U.S. in all other engineering disciplines combined. The label software engineer is used very liberally in the corporate world. Very few of the practicing software engineers actually hold Engineering degrees from accredited universities.

About half of all practitioners today have degrees in computer science, information systems, or information technology. A small, but growing, number of practitioners have software engineering degrees. In 1987, Imperial College London introduced the first three-year software engineering Bachelor's degree in the UK and the world; in the following year, the University of Sheffield established a similar program. In 1996, the Rochester Institute of Technology established the first software engineering bachelor's degree program in the United States, however, it did not obtain ABET accreditation until 2003, the same time as Rice University, Clarkson University, Milwaukee School of Engineering and Mississippi State University obtained theirs. In 1997, PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore, India was the first to start a five-year integrated Master of Science degree in Software Engineering.

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