Huh, I didn't realize that some hardware folks are still so irrationally jealous of the label "engineer" being applied to software engineers as well. In truth the distinction between a physical versus information end-product as a prerequisite for the term "engineer" is arbitrary, self-serving on your part, and not recognized by any common definition of "engineer" of which I am aware.
Not to be too hard on you though; yes, the biggest aesthetic difference between hardware and software engineering is that with the latter, the cost of fabrication is essentially zero. But as described here: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jajones/papers/p439.pdf
> The essential distinction between software and other engineered artifacts has always been the absence of fabrication cost. In conventional engineering of physical artifacts, the cost of materials and fabrication has dominated the cost of design and placed a check on the complexity of artifacts that can be designed. When one bottleneck is removed, others appear, and software engineering has therefore faced the essential challenges of complexity and the cost of design to an extent that conventional engineering has not.
So naturally the set of constraints is different than the ones with which hardware engineers contend, yet software engineers do fundamentally apply math and science to design products to meet hard, real-world constraints: Development time and cost, program correctness, time and space performance under expected load, reusability, and maintainability to name a few.
If there is a valid objection to the notion of software engineering as a "real" engineering discipline, it should be that a subset of the science upon which the discipline is based – that of software architecture – is at this point still underdeveloped and poorly understood, and as a result software engineers generally rely on their own intuition when it comes to architecture. (This in contrast to fundamental computer science, which is well developed enough that we can typically determine from mathematics or empirical evidence what kind of algorithm or data structure to use under given circumstances.)
But an arbitrary bias that engineers produce only physical artifacts does not constitute a valid objection.
Not to be too hard on you though; yes, the biggest aesthetic difference between hardware and software engineering is that with the latter, the cost of fabrication is essentially zero. But as described here: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jajones/papers/p439.pdf
> The essential distinction between software and other engineered artifacts has always been the absence of fabrication cost. In conventional engineering of physical artifacts, the cost of materials and fabrication has dominated the cost of design and placed a check on the complexity of artifacts that can be designed. When one bottleneck is removed, others appear, and software engineering has therefore faced the essential challenges of complexity and the cost of design to an extent that conventional engineering has not.
So naturally the set of constraints is different than the ones with which hardware engineers contend, yet software engineers do fundamentally apply math and science to design products to meet hard, real-world constraints: Development time and cost, program correctness, time and space performance under expected load, reusability, and maintainability to name a few.
If there is a valid objection to the notion of software engineering as a "real" engineering discipline, it should be that a subset of the science upon which the discipline is based – that of software architecture – is at this point still underdeveloped and poorly understood, and as a result software engineers generally rely on their own intuition when it comes to architecture. (This in contrast to fundamental computer science, which is well developed enough that we can typically determine from mathematics or empirical evidence what kind of algorithm or data structure to use under given circumstances.)
But an arbitrary bias that engineers produce only physical artifacts does not constitute a valid objection.