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Witness the world of unlicensed renegade civil engineers roving across the American landscape, building unauthorized bridges and infrastructure. Or perhaps Rob

Witness the world of unlicensed renegade civil engineers roving across the American landscape, building unauthorized bridges and infrastructure. Or perhaps Robert De Niro's character in Brazil.

pan69 5y ago
And I think this is where the crux of it is; not all software is equal. Building bridges is very different from putting a shed in someones backyard. Software is a spectrum and if your company builds sheds in peoples backyards then you don't have to hire in the same way you'd hire a civil engineer. Lots of companies copy the Google style interview without actually being anything like Google or any understanding why Google hires that way.
kragen 5y ago
Man, can you imagine how great our physical infrastructure would be if the Linus Torvaldses and Fabrice Bellards of the civil-engineering world could actually do this? Now imagine it was illegal for Linus Torvalds and Fabrice Bellard to do what they've done.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-27274086 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-27274086
  - kragen 5y ago
    It's difficult to interpret your comment. It's a link to a news story about how a partly built "illegal" stone bridge collapsed, killing 11 people, presumably because it was poorly designed. In context, you seem to be suggesting that Linux, QEMU, and ffmpeg are analogous to that bridge because they are of extremely poor quality, while there's some kind of official government software licensing body that protects people from such terrible software. Is that what you meant? No such body exists, though many attempts have been made to establish one, with dismayingly destructive results, as I outline in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30621151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30621151. I think that if we want to enable the Fabrice Bellard of civil engineering to build bridges, we probably need to keep all humans at a safe distance from the bridge until it's fully complete, then stress-test it to validate the FEM model before opening it to traffic. Also, probably not build it out of brittle materials like stone, because the stress test wouldn't give you enough information to validate the model's failure predictions. We should be thinking about how to make civil engineering more like software engineering, with rigorous version control, automated testing, automated builds, rapid improvement in the state of the art, and safety features that minimize risk to humans in case of failure. Not vice versa. (Though it would be nice if more programmers were in the habit of planning ahead and thinking about failure modes.)
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      It's an unserious comment responding to an unserious discussion. You've provided a bevy of historical knowledge, which while interesting, in no way resembles what software engineering licensing would be like in the present day. For one thing, corporate power is so entrenched and regulatory bodies so enervated in this space (as everywhere), there is absolutely no possible way the licensure dystopia you've so vividly conjured could exist. And nobody on this forum calling for licensing is asking for some onerous top-down governmental bureaucratic licensing regime, so you've basically created a neat '90s cyberpunk retrofuturistic setting that has little to no relevance to the discussion at hand. If anything, people are calling for industry standards, something akin to craftsmen guilds of olde, overseen by an existing professional association of engineers such as the ACM or the IEEE [0]. Alternatively, perhaps it could arise as the end result of Triplebyte or some other private solution trying to be the Collegeboard of this industry. Speaking of which, academic exams such as the SAT, the ACT, or AP tests have no legal binding, but most higher academic institutions (until recently) choose to use them as standards. So it's more of a widely-subscribed informal standard. In practice, such a license wouldn't hold too much water anyway, certainly FAANG would ignore it for the most part in favor of their higher standards, but perhaps it could at least be a Leetcode replacement for smaller firms [1]. That would save both applicants time in having to run the LC gauntlet over and over again and every single company they interview with, and help those smaller companies avoid their hiring woes of cargo-culting FAANG interview practices and accidentally filtering out every applicant along the way. None of this would forbid the practice of programming by non-accredited practitioners, as the licensing regime bogeyman you fear would have absolutely no teeth for enforcement. Finally, if formalizing the engineering nature of software engineers means that American engineers can be like their Canadian counterparts and wear iron rings [2] to mark their achievement and profession, then that is infinitely more cool than the status quo and more compelling than any number of fantasy dystopias, or evocations of the state of the art of '70s computing, or Operation Sundevil, or the goings-ons in... Iran. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30616114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30616114 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30493041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30493041 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring > We should be thinking about how to make civil engineering more like software engineering, with rigorous version control, automated testing, automated builds, rapid improvement in the state of the art, and safety features that minimize risk to humans in case of failure. Not vice versa. Have you seen the state of software engineering? I'm not sure if this field is in any state to be acting smarter-than-thou towards other engineering disciplines.

Witness the world of unlicensed renegade civil engineers roving across the American landscape, building unauthorized bridges and infrastructure. Or perhaps Robert De Niro's character in Brazil.

pan69 5y ago

And I think this is where the crux of it is; not all software is equal. Building bridges is very different from putting a shed in someones backyard. Software is a spectrum and if your company builds sheds in peoples backyards then you don't have to hire in the same way you'd hire a civil engineer. Lots of companies copy the Google style interview without actually being anything like Google or any understanding why Google hires that way.

kragen 5y ago

Man, can you imagine how great our physical infrastructure would be if the Linus Torvaldses and Fabrice Bellards of the civil-engineering world could actually do this? Now imagine it was illegal for Linus Torvalds and Fabrice Bellard to do what they've done.

Apocryphon 5y ago
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-27274086 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-27274086
- kragen 5y ago
  It's difficult to interpret your comment. It's a link to a news story about how a partly built "illegal" stone bridge collapsed, killing 11 people, presumably because it was poorly designed. In context, you seem to be suggesting that Linux, QEMU, and ffmpeg are analogous to that bridge because they are of extremely poor quality, while there's some kind of official government software licensing body that protects people from such terrible software. Is that what you meant? No such body exists, though many attempts have been made to establish one, with dismayingly destructive results, as I outline in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30621151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30621151. I think that if we want to enable the Fabrice Bellard of civil engineering to build bridges, we probably need to keep all humans at a safe distance from the bridge until it's fully complete, then stress-test it to validate the FEM model before opening it to traffic. Also, probably not build it out of brittle materials like stone, because the stress test wouldn't give you enough information to validate the model's failure predictions. We should be thinking about how to make civil engineering more like software engineering, with rigorous version control, automated testing, automated builds, rapid improvement in the state of the art, and safety features that minimize risk to humans in case of failure. Not vice versa. (Though it would be nice if more programmers were in the habit of planning ahead and thinking about failure modes.)
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    It's an unserious comment responding to an unserious discussion. You've provided a bevy of historical knowledge, which while interesting, in no way resembles what software engineering licensing would be like in the present day. For one thing, corporate power is so entrenched and regulatory bodies so enervated in this space (as everywhere), there is absolutely no possible way the licensure dystopia you've so vividly conjured could exist. And nobody on this forum calling for licensing is asking for some onerous top-down governmental bureaucratic licensing regime, so you've basically created a neat '90s cyberpunk retrofuturistic setting that has little to no relevance to the discussion at hand. If anything, people are calling for industry standards, something akin to craftsmen guilds of olde, overseen by an existing professional association of engineers such as the ACM or the IEEE [0]. Alternatively, perhaps it could arise as the end result of Triplebyte or some other private solution trying to be the Collegeboard of this industry. Speaking of which, academic exams such as the SAT, the ACT, or AP tests have no legal binding, but most higher academic institutions (until recently) choose to use them as standards. So it's more of a widely-subscribed informal standard. In practice, such a license wouldn't hold too much water anyway, certainly FAANG would ignore it for the most part in favor of their higher standards, but perhaps it could at least be a Leetcode replacement for smaller firms [1]. That would save both applicants time in having to run the LC gauntlet over and over again and every single company they interview with, and help those smaller companies avoid their hiring woes of cargo-culting FAANG interview practices and accidentally filtering out every applicant along the way. None of this would forbid the practice of programming by non-accredited practitioners, as the licensing regime bogeyman you fear would have absolutely no teeth for enforcement. Finally, if formalizing the engineering nature of software engineers means that American engineers can be like their Canadian counterparts and wear iron rings [2] to mark their achievement and profession, then that is infinitely more cool than the status quo and more compelling than any number of fantasy dystopias, or evocations of the state of the art of '70s computing, or Operation Sundevil, or the goings-ons in... Iran. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30616114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30616114 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30493041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30493041 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring > We should be thinking about how to make civil engineering more like software engineering, with rigorous version control, automated testing, automated builds, rapid improvement in the state of the art, and safety features that minimize risk to humans in case of failure. Not vice versa. Have you seen the state of software engineering? I'm not sure if this field is in any state to be acting smarter-than-thou towards other engineering disciplines.