I was expecting this might be a polarising comment, hence some up and down-voting. There's too much back-patting here on YC, IMO, when people are claiming to be what they are not, or when they write some article about how they 'hacked' something that actually isn't that impressive. Sometimes the bar seems to be set pretty low indeed.
I believe part of it is that the general age demographic here is pretty young, and a lot of people have not so much experience working across a range of projects with a large number of people.
A year does not an 'engineer' make, in any field. Why should it be different in the field of software? It's not.
"That's because you aren't a software engineer, and if you are saying so then the feelings of being an impostor are entirely warranted."
At face value this assessment feels very unfair. Where do you draw the line? Experience -- is a year not enough? Deliverables -- is YumHacker not enough? Education -- is it lack of formal training that separates the engineer from the coder?
Is it the ability to build non-trivial software systems that makes a software engineer? And we should rely on whose definition of "non-trivial" to assess her engineering ability in that case?
I'm not saying you're wrong in stating she isn't a software engineer, but I doubt you possess the knowledge of her ability required to make such an assessment with any degree of validity.
This is a interesting post to me because I also started programming a year and two months ago. I took a much different approach because I wanted to be considered an engineer not just a "coder". I can say that I did not feel like one after three months of digging into Codecademy Code Year (yes, in three months). I didn't know how to build outside of their sandbox.
Then I dug deeper in Javascript, reading every book I could find until I knew all the pitfalls of the language firstclass functions, global namespacing, scopes, etc...Still did not feel like an engineer.
Dug into Objective-C (that's right...I skipped C) and struggled for three months to build my first app and launch it in the App Store (mostly because re-wrote it over and over not understanding the Core Data model issues I was having. Was I an engineer yet...NOT.
That's right, I skipped C. So, I went back and got into the C book and everything I could find on design patterns, etc.
One year in, trying to really build an app that does not suck and really get close to the metal with some assembly (yes, I know, I have been working backwards!) And do I consider myself an engineer now...? Kind of. Not a good one if I am (despite being a "hellava engineer" graduate from GaTech).
I may not consider myself one for the rest of the year. But that's me. I wish I had her feel for what she is. She posted to HN and I didn't so I give her props for that.
I make software - I don't think it really matters what you call yourself, and I've certainly never seen anyone not get hired because they were looking for a software engineer and someone had "backend programmer" on their resume.
I would agree that what she was doing in her 180 days project probably was not software engineering, but what about what she is doing with YumHacker? If that isn't considered software engineering, then a lot of us here are not software engineers.
It depends. If she's relying heavily upon frameworks and canned tools (which is actually a good thing, because re-inventing the wheel is bad), it's entirely possible to build a website without doing any 'engineering'. I typically consider engineering to be algorithms, data structures, performance analysis, etc. Hard computer-sciency stuff ... which definitely has its place on the web - database developers, browser developers, operating system developers ... they are engineers. Websites like Amazon and Facebook also employ engineers, which is why they are able to release new toolsets capable of pushing the envelop in some way. Or maybe I've got it wrong ... I don't really know. I work on hard real-time embedded stuff for my day job (avionics platforms), so my perspective on web stuff might be a bit uninformed.
Yes, because civil engineer = architect + math, what a good analogy (hint: no, it's not, until people that have studied civil engineering and not architecture start winning the Pritzker regularly).
Do you also think the difference between a doctor and a biomedical engineer is math?
P.S.: I agree with your first point, but the analogy you chose is really bad. Self-taught coder isn't to a software engineer what an architect
is to a civil engineer.
That's because you aren't a software engineer, and if you are saying so then the feelings of being an impostor are entirely warranted.
'Coding' is one thing, 'engineering' is something different altogether.
I'm afraid this falls into the 'you don't know what you don't know category'.