4 ms·

Is software engineering a real engineering discipline, though? I have a hard time saying yes when "software engineers" make mistakes that are well documented, n

by jaxx75 7y ago

Is software engineering a real engineering discipline, though? I have a hard time saying yes when "software engineers" make mistakes that are well documented, no certification is necessary, and it isn't a legal definition.

commandlinefan 7y ago
> Is software engineering a real engineering discipline, though? Maybe it isn't yet, but I hope that there will come a day in my lifetime that it is.
- glouwbug 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches With such a list, one would hope software engineering becomes a protected title
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    But will that really help though? It'll just be another mechanism for signaling, but that doesn't mean it will improve the situation, because the technology moves so fast that it's virtually impossible for the certification to be relevant, unless you mandate that software engineers get a certificate every year in some arbitrary newest technologies. Engineering is a field where we understand the fundamentals. Changes from year to year or even decade to decade aren't going to uproot half of the things you know about it. In software that can very much be the case.
    - notabee 7y ago
      Goodhart's Law applies, so you can't have a set-and-forget certification process. It can be a dynamic process. And just perhaps, we should disincentivize trying to launch new technologies when the institutional knowledge is not there yet. I wonder how many of those security compromises come from bad tradeoffs trying to "keep up with the Joneses" instead of addressing technical debt and knowledge gaps?
      - Mirioron 7y ago
        The problem is that this is an industry of tinkerers. A lot of projects started out and continue to be maintained by people that do it as a side project. How are you going to police that? People seem to build software as a hobby and sometimes that morphs into a library.
        notabee 7y ago
        If a tinkering structural engineer designed some new type of, say, a joist, would builders just throw it into a new structure because it's new, or would it need a vetting and review process before becoming a structural dependency? Review doesn't need to happen at the creative level, just at the level where new code gets integrated in some non-trivial, safety-critical deployment. That happens informally now, as people submit issues, pull requests, etc. for projects that they're interested in, but sometimes that is not enough and calls for something more rigorous, like the peer review process in science. Things like the npm left-pad incident clearly show that we're favoring expediency and speed far too much over resiliency. Software now in many places is where architecture was before building codes and fire escapes.
chalst 7y ago
There are people who know how to construct reliable software, Joe Armstrong having been one. I don't think this knowledge has crystalised into a profession yet.
- dnautics 7y ago
  It has, I think devops in its ideal form is basically that.
exdsq 7y ago
Yes, because you can be a chartered engineer off the back of software development experience and a CS Masters. There isn't a more definitive way to say yes or no than that imo.
- lastres0rt 7y ago
  Really? I have a CS Masters and people question my abilities all the time. Must be the tits.
  - exdsq 7y ago
    This is in the UK but yeah - you can get Chartered status for sure! Doesn’t mean people won’t question your abilities but it helps with signalling
pitaj 7y ago
Depends on how you define "real engineer." In the US, you do not need a certification to call yourself an engineer.
- analog31 7y ago
  In my state, you need a license to offer engineering services to the public, but not if you work for an industrial employer. However, your design may have to go through a regulatory approval process, and the people who are hired for that work are licensed engineers. In some fields such as civil and nuclear engineering, so much of the work is regulatory, that they only hire licensed engineers as a matter of course. In my view, "engineer" is getting harder to define. At my workplace, anybody who does anything techy and has a degree is an "engineer" if in the product development department, or a "scientist" if in R&D. Only a small handful of the engineers do what a traditionalist would recognize as "hard" quantitative engineering. Most of the work is fitting building blocks together, troubleshooting, bureaucracy, etc.
kabdib 7y ago
Man, the people who push certification systems on the software engineering community really burn my biscuits. I haven't seen a certification system that wasn't either a money-grab (product-specific certifications, like Windows or Novell), a power-grab (by someone like the IEEE, where the tests were half electrical engineering and the software bits were garbage practices from the 70s and 80s), or a way to artificially restrict the number of available practitioners (arguably another money-grab). No certification system is going to magically make large systems easier to write or whisk away bugs. Writing software is hard. It's that simple. People who have spent their entire careers writing software, from industry luminaries that you read about every day to the really, really good engineers you've never heard of, who are absolute wizards, these people are still writing howlingly bad bugs because writing software is hard. You can have your certifications and legal requirements for training and so on, just don't pretend they will improve the state of the art. The best you can do is hold people's feet to the fire after they make mistakes, and if the best people in the industry can't be perfect, why would we expect threats of punishment to fix anything? Engineering is about designing and building systems, usually with cost, time and reliability constraints. It's totally separate from whatever liability framework is being enforced this week.
- notabee 7y ago
  It's not about being perfect, it's about being fault tolerant, just like regular engineering. I think especially for safety-critical situations (cough Boeing cough) there needs to be stringent, formal standards for quality, review, and training. It should not be possible to cheap out or ship a pile of duct-taped garbage in some situations, and that requires external review by subject matter experts. (Not necessarily government bodies, especially with the regulatory capture and brain drain going on right now.)
  - TheCapn 7y ago
    Agreed. I am a "Software Engineer". I hold a Professional Engineer designation by APEGS, my schooling was for Software Engineering. I advocate for regulation in the industry but also don't think it needs to be sweeping and catch-all. My job has me working within Industrial Control environments. Programming mistakes can kill people or damage equipment worth millions. When I receive a software package from someone I want to have some trust in a system that this person wasn't hired off the street for lowest wage. My employer has a good reputation in our industry and is asked to come clean up messes from programmers overseas who provide a bad system and walk away from it. If your job doesn't have you playing with lives of people or holding the wellbeing of a company in your hands then regulation shouldn't be as stringent. But to say that every project of that magnitude has an Engineer overseeing and holding responsibility over it isn't overreaching imo.
closeparen 7y ago
You would also have to dismiss mechanical and electrical engineers then, right? Licensing requirements are only ubiquitous in civil engineering.

by jaxx75 7y ago

commandlinefan 7y ago

> Is software engineering a real engineering discipline, though? Maybe it isn't yet, but I hope that there will come a day in my lifetime that it is.

glouwbug 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches With such a list, one would hope software engineering becomes a protected title
- Mirioron 7y ago
  But will that really help though? It'll just be another mechanism for signaling, but that doesn't mean it will improve the situation, because the technology moves so fast that it's virtually impossible for the certification to be relevant, unless you mandate that software engineers get a certificate every year in some arbitrary newest technologies. Engineering is a field where we understand the fundamentals. Changes from year to year or even decade to decade aren't going to uproot half of the things you know about it. In software that can very much be the case.
  - notabee 7y ago
    Goodhart's Law applies, so you can't have a set-and-forget certification process. It can be a dynamic process. And just perhaps, we should disincentivize trying to launch new technologies when the institutional knowledge is not there yet. I wonder how many of those security compromises come from bad tradeoffs trying to "keep up with the Joneses" instead of addressing technical debt and knowledge gaps?
    - Mirioron 7y ago
      The problem is that this is an industry of tinkerers. A lot of projects started out and continue to be maintained by people that do it as a side project. How are you going to police that? People seem to build software as a hobby and sometimes that morphs into a library.
      - notabee 7y ago
        If a tinkering structural engineer designed some new type of, say, a joist, would builders just throw it into a new structure because it's new, or would it need a vetting and review process before becoming a structural dependency? Review doesn't need to happen at the creative level, just at the level where new code gets integrated in some non-trivial, safety-critical deployment. That happens informally now, as people submit issues, pull requests, etc. for projects that they're interested in, but sometimes that is not enough and calls for something more rigorous, like the peer review process in science. Things like the npm left-pad incident clearly show that we're favoring expediency and speed far too much over resiliency. Software now in many places is where architecture was before building codes and fire escapes.

chalst 7y ago

There are people who know how to construct reliable software, Joe Armstrong having been one. I don't think this knowledge has crystalised into a profession yet.

dnautics 7y ago
It has, I think devops in its ideal form is basically that.

exdsq 7y ago

Yes, because you can be a chartered engineer off the back of software development experience and a CS Masters. There isn't a more definitive way to say yes or no than that imo.

lastres0rt 7y ago
Really? I have a CS Masters and people question my abilities all the time. Must be the tits.
- exdsq 7y ago
  This is in the UK but yeah - you can get Chartered status for sure! Doesn’t mean people won’t question your abilities but it helps with signalling

pitaj 7y ago

Depends on how you define "real engineer." In the US, you do not need a certification to call yourself an engineer.

analog31 7y ago
In my state, you need a license to offer engineering services to the public, but not if you work for an industrial employer. However, your design may have to go through a regulatory approval process, and the people who are hired for that work are licensed engineers. In some fields such as civil and nuclear engineering, so much of the work is regulatory, that they only hire licensed engineers as a matter of course. In my view, "engineer" is getting harder to define. At my workplace, anybody who does anything techy and has a degree is an "engineer" if in the product development department, or a "scientist" if in R&D. Only a small handful of the engineers do what a traditionalist would recognize as "hard" quantitative engineering. Most of the work is fitting building blocks together, troubleshooting, bureaucracy, etc.

kabdib 7y ago

Man, the people who push certification systems on the software engineering community really burn my biscuits. I haven't seen a certification system that wasn't either a money-grab (product-specific certifications, like Windows or Novell), a power-grab (by someone like the IEEE, where the tests were half electrical engineering and the software bits were garbage practices from the 70s and 80s), or a way to artificially restrict the number of available practitioners (arguably another money-grab). No certification system is going to magically make large systems easier to write or whisk away bugs. Writing software is hard. It's that simple. People who have spent their entire careers writing software, from industry luminaries that you read about every day to the really, really good engineers you've never heard of, who are absolute wizards, these people are still writing howlingly bad bugs because writing software is hard. You can have your certifications and legal requirements for training and so on, just don't pretend they will improve the state of the art. The best you can do is hold people's feet to the fire after they make mistakes, and if the best people in the industry can't be perfect, why would we expect threats of punishment to fix anything? Engineering is about designing and building systems, usually with cost, time and reliability constraints. It's totally separate from whatever liability framework is being enforced this week.

notabee 7y ago
It's not about being perfect, it's about being fault tolerant, just like regular engineering. I think especially for safety-critical situations (cough Boeing cough) there needs to be stringent, formal standards for quality, review, and training. It should not be possible to cheap out or ship a pile of duct-taped garbage in some situations, and that requires external review by subject matter experts. (Not necessarily government bodies, especially with the regulatory capture and brain drain going on right now.)
- TheCapn 7y ago
  Agreed. I am a "Software Engineer". I hold a Professional Engineer designation by APEGS, my schooling was for Software Engineering. I advocate for regulation in the industry but also don't think it needs to be sweeping and catch-all. My job has me working within Industrial Control environments. Programming mistakes can kill people or damage equipment worth millions. When I receive a software package from someone I want to have some trust in a system that this person wasn't hired off the street for lowest wage. My employer has a good reputation in our industry and is asked to come clean up messes from programmers overseas who provide a bad system and walk away from it. If your job doesn't have you playing with lives of people or holding the wellbeing of a company in your hands then regulation shouldn't be as stringent. But to say that every project of that magnitude has an Engineer overseeing and holding responsibility over it isn't overreaching imo.

closeparen 7y ago

You would also have to dismiss mechanical and electrical engineers then, right? Licensing requirements are only ubiquitous in civil engineering.