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Maybe it's time to build the American Software Engineer Association, buy a nice building next to Capitol Hill and lobby Congress and state legislatures to manda

Maybe it's time to build the American Software Engineer Association, buy a nice building next to Capitol Hill and lobby Congress and state legislatures to mandate licensure. That would secure a walled garden for the profession and ensure leverage for the foreseeable future.

analog31 5y ago
Don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but taking this at face value, here's a recent thread related to engineering licensure: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27559804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27559804 With licensure comes regulation. Oddly there seems to be more demand and better pay for unlicensed computer programmers than there is for engineers in the licensed fields. Every electrical engineer I know, who can program well enough to do it for money, eventually becomes a software developer.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I switched from mechanical engineering to programming, in part because of the money. I saw software people making bank, and the financial career path for mechanical engineers was much more limited.
  - analog31 5y ago
    With a physics degree, I was never a proper engineer, and am not employed as a programmer per se. But I think it's safe to say that I have capitalized on my programming skills to advance my career in terms of both rank and income. At the same time, I don't regret not making a career of programming, because I'm not sure that I would have been happy or successful in a pure software job. When I was a kid, I had a summer internship at a computer facility, and programming struck me as something that would be interesting if I was doing it in the service of my own interests, but pretty dull if doing it all day for someone else. Granted, that was a very narrow perspective, and possibly obsolete, but it was the best I could figure out at the time.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      I don't regret switching to programming, either, as it has been a happy and fulfilling career. But working on an airplane gearbox was also satisfying, a bucket list item for me. If I hadn't have done it, I'd always wonder if I would have been good enough to do that kind of work. Working on that system has had significant impact on the D programming language and my ideas about programming. Who'd have thought that would happen?

analog31 5y ago

Don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but taking this at face value, here's a recent thread related to engineering licensure: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27559804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27559804 With licensure comes regulation. Oddly there seems to be more demand and better pay for unlicensed computer programmers than there is for engineers in the licensed fields. Every electrical engineer I know, who can program well enough to do it for money, eventually becomes a software developer.

WalterBright 5y ago
I switched from mechanical engineering to programming, in part because of the money. I saw software people making bank, and the financial career path for mechanical engineers was much more limited.
- analog31 5y ago
  With a physics degree, I was never a proper engineer, and am not employed as a programmer per se. But I think it's safe to say that I have capitalized on my programming skills to advance my career in terms of both rank and income. At the same time, I don't regret not making a career of programming, because I'm not sure that I would have been happy or successful in a pure software job. When I was a kid, I had a summer internship at a computer facility, and programming struck me as something that would be interesting if I was doing it in the service of my own interests, but pretty dull if doing it all day for someone else. Granted, that was a very narrow perspective, and possibly obsolete, but it was the best I could figure out at the time.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I don't regret switching to programming, either, as it has been a happy and fulfilling career. But working on an airplane gearbox was also satisfying, a bucket list item for me. If I hadn't have done it, I'd always wonder if I would have been good enough to do that kind of work. Working on that system has had significant impact on the D programming language and my ideas about programming. Who'd have thought that would happen?