Question:  I know someone who never went to college who is calling themselves a software engineer.  I was told that a Oracle software engineer required a 4 year degree in engineering.  Can you become an Oracle software engineer without a degree?

Answer:  No, a layman would never be able to master the complex calculus and rigor of a real software engineering job.  While it's illegal to call yourself a "professional engineer" in most States, any schmuk can call themselves a Oracle Engineer or a Software Engineer.  It's like a

Oracle software engineer duties

Many ignorant people don’t realize the difference between an IT professional (a developer or programmer) and a software engineer.  Software engineering is taught as a sub-area within the electrical engineering department of universities and course topics involve loads of physics, calculus and math.  In fact, most professional engineering schools required that student’s minor in mathematics.

Professional software engineers are a world-away from application programmers.  They earn up to twice as much salary as a programmer, a reward for the super-rigorous 4-year engineering degree. 

Sadly, there are no State or Federal licensing regulations for computer professionals.  In most States, it’s illegal to call yourself a professional software engineer unless you are duly licensed and certified.  In other States, calling yourself a software engineer is like a janitor calling themselves a custodial engineer. 

You can usually spot a fake Oracle engineer by examining their credeitials:

Fake engineers are a real problem in the Oracle industry.  Calling yourself an engineer without the appropriate degree and license is a criminal offense, and phony engineers are given stiff prison sentences.  Using a title with the word “engineer” is illegal in some jurisdictions, like the offensive term “Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer”, which offends all real engineers.

Some of the fake Oracle engineers have no engineering training whatsoever, and their ineptitude combined with an unjustified sense of accomplishment has led to serious production outages.  See how Dangerous Dilettantes Destroy Databases.

Oracle Academy lists the job of “entry level database engineer” duties as maintaining the integrity of data and running queries against the database.

 In Oracle technology, the duties of a software engineer involve writing low-level OS software extensions (Linux drivers, &c), designing complex algorithms and writing assembler routines.

Here are some major differences between a software engineer and a programmer.

• Languages – Programmers use procedural languages to solve business problems, software engineers write procedural languages and low-level functions.

• Volume – There are less than 3 million software engineers in the world, while there are tens of millions of developers and programmers.

• Assignment – Software engineers are usually given jobs as System Administrators or Database Administrators, while IT graduates are given jobs as Application Programmers.

Working as an Oracle software engineer is academically challenging.  Most software engineering programs graduate less than 10% of the freshman class, and even a degree as an engineer will not guarantee you a job in a competitive market.  Oracle Corporation only hires their software engineers from competitive engineering schools such as Harvard, Brown MIT and Stanford.

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