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The point is there was once a time when sprinkling some HTML and putting a site on the web automatically made you a wizard, and if you were young enough you mig

The point is there was once a time when sprinkling some HTML and putting a site on the web automatically made you a wizard, and if you were young enough you might even be hailed as “the next Bill Gates”. Those days are over. When society was illiterate, people who could simply read and write might have been held in the same prestige as those who write novels or manuscripts. As literacy grew however, so did society’s ability to distinguish between skill levels. The same will happen with code. I remember when mobile development was at its hottest peak, declaring I was an iOS developer practically made people bow down in awe and throw offers my way for help with developing their mobile app idea (usually in exchange for equity or “revenue share”). Nowadays the field is so commoditized I don’t even mention my 8 years experience with iOS except in passing conversation. A computer science degree is enough to call yourself a software engineer because most people can’t tell the difference these days. But for people who know the industry, a front end dev whose job is to basically push pixels on to a page is hardly an engineer, and I’d say is our modern version of a mid ‘00s website designer. Having a timeless standard for what makes someone a Software Engineer that we can all agree on and can be verified by third parties would be helpful. Naturally, this will be met with resistance because there are many people who will not qualify, and who do not want an engineering license that would require them to be liable for their work.

cr0sh 9y ago
> Having a timeless standard for what makes someone a Software Engineer that we can all agree on and can be verified by third parties would be helpful. I would think that if this were possible, it would have happened by now. Programming as a profession - while not as old as other "engineering professions" - is much older than what you are insinuating here; for instance, COBOL dates from 1959, FORTRAN is a couple years older, and there are a few older languages before that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languag... But let's use COBOL as a "standard" - since there is a ton of COBOL out there still running and being maintained (and probably more than a bit being created "new"). That's almost 60 years worth of commercial software development (using various languages starting with COBOL). If a standard could be considered and developed, it would have likely been done by now. There are more than a few arguments as to why it hasn't, but one of the best ones I have read about has to do with the fact that our tools, techniques, etc - seem to change and are updated so quickly, that standards for testing would become outdated at an insane pace. An engineer certified on a set of standards might be obsolete before he left the building! Ok - somewhat hyperbolic, but you get the idea. For the "classic" engineers, their tools and techniques don't change much if at all over long periods of time - so certification is more straightforward. For some engineering professions, you can pretty much take someone who was certified in 1970, and be pretty certain that he or she would be able to do the same kind of work today. That would definitely not be the case for a proverbial "software engineer" certified to the standards of that time...

cr0sh 9y ago

> Having a timeless standard for what makes someone a Software Engineer that we can all agree on and can be verified by third parties would be helpful. I would think that if this were possible, it would have happened by now. Programming as a profession - while not as old as other "engineering professions" - is much older than what you are insinuating here; for instance, COBOL dates from 1959, FORTRAN is a couple years older, and there are a few older languages before that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languag... But let's use COBOL as a "standard" - since there is a ton of COBOL out there still running and being maintained (and probably more than a bit being created "new"). That's almost 60 years worth of commercial software development (using various languages starting with COBOL). If a standard could be considered and developed, it would have likely been done by now. There are more than a few arguments as to why it hasn't, but one of the best ones I have read about has to do with the fact that our tools, techniques, etc - seem to change and are updated so quickly, that standards for testing would become outdated at an insane pace. An engineer certified on a set of standards might be obsolete before he left the building! Ok - somewhat hyperbolic, but you get the idea. For the "classic" engineers, their tools and techniques don't change much if at all over long periods of time - so certification is more straightforward. For some engineering professions, you can pretty much take someone who was certified in 1970, and be pretty certain that he or she would be able to do the same kind of work today. That would definitely not be the case for a proverbial "software engineer" certified to the standards of that time...