Hardware companies need lots of land, which is in short supply in Metro. Perhaps this is why most hardware companies are in south Burnaby and Richmond. Whereas for software jobs, all you need are computers, hard drives, network connections, etc. No soldering or pen and paper verifying calculations of Fourier transforms. Hardware is the physical world while software is the virtual world. The convenience factor is evident for software vs. hardware.

In an /r/askengineers thread, it was noted that the last Game Changer in hardware was Intel, whereas Game Changers in software sprout up once every 45 seconds. Part of me wishes I had gone into ECE, and maybe that's why I'm always looking for jobs that combine hardware and software. From what I've seen in Vancouver, most hardware/software jobs pay crap compared to pure software jobs. (MDA)

I wanted to ask you, what do you think about devs calling themselves engineers? e.g. Tech companies putting dev positions in the "engineering" division of the company, development blogs being known as "engineering blogs", companies referencing "our engineers" when talking about their devs...I know APEGBC allows this, so does PEO, but APEGA does not; you're not a software engineer without a BASc and E.I.T. or PEng. Not sure about Quebec.

I've grown up with the traditional definition in Canada of engineering, which is leveraging physics to design objects, many of which are in the public interest or the public good. This works when you're working with physical objects, but when you enter the virtual world, things change. I think as computing continues to grow, CCPE may want to loosen their rigid definitions on what engineering really is. UC Berkeley has a great course in electronics called EE 16A; I can't see any Canadian institution creating a similar course without running afoul of the CEAB.

With that being said, it still feels strange to call devs "engineers". Especially after watching some of Engineerguy's videos on Youtube, it's like, some dev working on AWS is not an engineer. If you have a rigorous process for software testing, documentation and debugging, that's more like software engineering, along with financial/PM aspects. Electrical engineers work on power lines and other high-frequency electronics. Computer engineers work on microelectronics and digital circuits. Do most devs deserve the title "engineer"?