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I can't imagine any serious developer thinking a licensing program would improve outcomes. One reason this blog post is a bunch of images and analogies instead

I can't imagine any serious developer thinking a licensing program would improve outcomes. One reason this blog post is a bunch of images and analogies instead of a coherently constructed argument about how things would work in practice is because that couldn't hold up to scrutiny.

coldtea 5y ago
>I can't imagine any serious developer thinking a licensing program would improve outcomes. The "serious" qualifier makes this a "no true Scotsman". If a developer thinks that, then one can always say "he is not a serious developer".
- Doxin 5y ago
  Just because an argument contains a logical fallacy doesn't mean the entire argument is fallacious. Never mind that the GP probably had a definition in mind for the words "serious developer" there, making it not a "no true Scotsman" fallacy but just a badly worded argument.
- SamReidHughes 5y ago
  The developer just needs to have good systems thinking. Anybody who disagrees with that is a goals thinker.
dataflow 5y ago
Do you have any links to such arguments and rebuttals to them? I dare say it's not obvious to everyone why a licensing program would not improve outcomes.
- SamReidHughes 5y ago
  No, sorry. I've never seen any argument of the sort that describes some cause-and-effect relationship, like, developer licensing => downstream effects => outcome improvement achieved. It's not like I go looking for these, though.
  - dataflow 5y ago
    Okay, but then can't you apply your logic to other licensed professions? Like, say, electricians? Are you against licensing in general? or is your position that software is somehow fundamentally different from all the other professions in those regards?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - native_samples 5y ago
      There are sound arguments against professional licensing, yes. You may not find them discussed on this forum much but the arguments for and against licensing stretch back hundreds of years. A few arguments you could search for, if you want to dig deeper: - Licensing is used to restrict entry into the profession to prop up wages, i.e. it often turns into a form of wage cartel. In extreme cases it can degrade into a pure cartel without any connection to actual professional practice; NY taxi medallions are an example of this in which the license is tradable and rentable, because buying one costs millions of dollars. - The qualifications requirements are often either redundant (everyone was asking for them anyway) or obsolete (the industry has changed but everyone still has to pass these tests). Obsolete licensing rules are often impossible to get rid of because the people who put effort into passing them don't want to see their "investment" be invalidated. Again using taxi licensing as an example, black cab drivers in London have to literally memorize the street map of central London such that they can recite a set of street directions from any arbitrarily chosen A to B, on demand, from memory. It's called The Knowledge and there are examiners who test this. Just last week a newly qualified cabby was telling me about this. He recounted on how his first day he discovered that the Knowledge was useless for actual navigation because you can't memorize traffic conditions. So now he uses Google Maps/Waze anyway, because it lets you see congestion. The Knowledge became largely irrelevant with the arrival of high quality GPS units, but it lives on decades later because the licensing bodies won't remove a rule that gives them power and cabbies aren't allowed to deviate from it/like the way it keeps out low cost competition. - Licensing can be abused for political purposes. The threat of medical license revocation is routinely deployed to silence criticism of government policies on COVID or COVID vaccines. - Licensing is often subtractive rather than additive. The licensed software developer's answer to writing engine control code safely without bugs is MISRA-C. This takes C and tries to make it safe by writing down lots of rules to follow which get steadily more restrictive with time (MISRA-C:2012 contains 143 rules and 16 directives). The unlicensed software developer's answer to writing safe embedded code is Rust - the rules would say you have to use MISRA-C, so there'd be no point trying to go beyond it. Moreover nobody would have developed Rust because the internal drive for self improvement would be gone. The sort of people who created Rust are not the sort of people who also enjoy political lobbying, and the sort of people who funded it would have lost their motivation if they could just say "we comply with all relevant regulations" and wash their hands of errors.
manigandham 5y ago
What is a serious vs non-serious developer? How do you tell them apart?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
bakuninsbart 5y ago
A particular case where I would disagree with you is security. There has to be someone who is responsible and liable for large data breaches, and the way things work more often than not at the moment is that no particular person feels responsible at any company, and everyone basically just hopes it will all work out. This is the exact equivalent of a licensed electrician needing to sign off on any electrical work. An absence of ensured quality standards in the profession also doesn't mean that there is an absence of tests, these are moved to the individual company level instead, and, in our profession, often take weird turns like ritualized coding interviews. On the point that no serious developer would think that this improves outcomes, I have to disappoint you, there are major companies like SAP with a culture of requiring masters degrees for almost all promotions.
- TheAceOfHearts 5y ago
  My first response is that the CEO or CTO should be responsible for data breaches. Leadership should be sure to give engineering enough time and resources to secure their systems. If a system is insecure it's usually a management failure. But in practice, I don't think that works either. We're building immensely complex systems across numerous layers each of which is the result of thousands of engineering hours. The costs to properly harden and secure most systems is not worth it. And even if you spend the effort to harden the system, it could still fall to a carefully crafted attack. If you get attacked by a 0-day exploit from a malicious nation-state there's a level at which most companies would fail. Security isn't some binary thing, it's an onion. And there's no meaningful conversation to be had about security without first taking your risk profile into consideration.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Security certainly is difficult, but the Equifax hack wasn't particularly complex, was it?
    - native_samples 5y ago
      You can't define complex in a way clear enough to be useful. Maybe in your eyes it wasn't a "complex" hack, but what specifically distinguishes Equifax from nVidia or the other tech firms getting hacked right now? That you could write down, formalize, test in a court of law and which would last more than 6 months as an accepted definition? What about the China/Google hack in 2010? That was widely regarded as a groundbreaking attack by a nation state, but it started with an employee clicking a phishing link.

coldtea 5y ago

>I can't imagine any serious developer thinking a licensing program would improve outcomes. The "serious" qualifier makes this a "no true Scotsman". If a developer thinks that, then one can always say "he is not a serious developer".

Doxin 5y ago
Just because an argument contains a logical fallacy doesn't mean the entire argument is fallacious. Never mind that the GP probably had a definition in mind for the words "serious developer" there, making it not a "no true Scotsman" fallacy but just a badly worded argument.
SamReidHughes 5y ago
The developer just needs to have good systems thinking. Anybody who disagrees with that is a goals thinker.

dataflow 5y ago

Do you have any links to such arguments and rebuttals to them? I dare say it's not obvious to everyone why a licensing program would not improve outcomes.

SamReidHughes 5y ago
No, sorry. I've never seen any argument of the sort that describes some cause-and-effect relationship, like, developer licensing => downstream effects => outcome improvement achieved. It's not like I go looking for these, though.
- dataflow 5y ago
  Okay, but then can't you apply your logic to other licensed professions? Like, say, electricians? Are you against licensing in general? or is your position that software is somehow fundamentally different from all the other professions in those regards?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - native_samples 5y ago
    There are sound arguments against professional licensing, yes. You may not find them discussed on this forum much but the arguments for and against licensing stretch back hundreds of years. A few arguments you could search for, if you want to dig deeper: - Licensing is used to restrict entry into the profession to prop up wages, i.e. it often turns into a form of wage cartel. In extreme cases it can degrade into a pure cartel without any connection to actual professional practice; NY taxi medallions are an example of this in which the license is tradable and rentable, because buying one costs millions of dollars. - The qualifications requirements are often either redundant (everyone was asking for them anyway) or obsolete (the industry has changed but everyone still has to pass these tests). Obsolete licensing rules are often impossible to get rid of because the people who put effort into passing them don't want to see their "investment" be invalidated. Again using taxi licensing as an example, black cab drivers in London have to literally memorize the street map of central London such that they can recite a set of street directions from any arbitrarily chosen A to B, on demand, from memory. It's called The Knowledge and there are examiners who test this. Just last week a newly qualified cabby was telling me about this. He recounted on how his first day he discovered that the Knowledge was useless for actual navigation because you can't memorize traffic conditions. So now he uses Google Maps/Waze anyway, because it lets you see congestion. The Knowledge became largely irrelevant with the arrival of high quality GPS units, but it lives on decades later because the licensing bodies won't remove a rule that gives them power and cabbies aren't allowed to deviate from it/like the way it keeps out low cost competition. - Licensing can be abused for political purposes. The threat of medical license revocation is routinely deployed to silence criticism of government policies on COVID or COVID vaccines. - Licensing is often subtractive rather than additive. The licensed software developer's answer to writing engine control code safely without bugs is MISRA-C. This takes C and tries to make it safe by writing down lots of rules to follow which get steadily more restrictive with time (MISRA-C:2012 contains 143 rules and 16 directives). The unlicensed software developer's answer to writing safe embedded code is Rust - the rules would say you have to use MISRA-C, so there'd be no point trying to go beyond it. Moreover nobody would have developed Rust because the internal drive for self improvement would be gone. The sort of people who created Rust are not the sort of people who also enjoy political lobbying, and the sort of people who funded it would have lost their motivation if they could just say "we comply with all relevant regulations" and wash their hands of errors.

manigandham 5y ago

What is a serious vs non-serious developer? How do you tell them apart?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

bakuninsbart 5y ago

A particular case where I would disagree with you is security. There has to be someone who is responsible and liable for large data breaches, and the way things work more often than not at the moment is that no particular person feels responsible at any company, and everyone basically just hopes it will all work out. This is the exact equivalent of a licensed electrician needing to sign off on any electrical work. An absence of ensured quality standards in the profession also doesn't mean that there is an absence of tests, these are moved to the individual company level instead, and, in our profession, often take weird turns like ritualized coding interviews. On the point that no serious developer would think that this improves outcomes, I have to disappoint you, there are major companies like SAP with a culture of requiring masters degrees for almost all promotions.

TheAceOfHearts 5y ago
My first response is that the CEO or CTO should be responsible for data breaches. Leadership should be sure to give engineering enough time and resources to secure their systems. If a system is insecure it's usually a management failure. But in practice, I don't think that works either. We're building immensely complex systems across numerous layers each of which is the result of thousands of engineering hours. The costs to properly harden and secure most systems is not worth it. And even if you spend the effort to harden the system, it could still fall to a carefully crafted attack. If you get attacked by a 0-day exploit from a malicious nation-state there's a level at which most companies would fail. Security isn't some binary thing, it's an onion. And there's no meaningful conversation to be had about security without first taking your risk profile into consideration.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Security certainly is difficult, but the Equifax hack wasn't particularly complex, was it?
  - native_samples 5y ago
    You can't define complex in a way clear enough to be useful. Maybe in your eyes it wasn't a "complex" hack, but what specifically distinguishes Equifax from nVidia or the other tech firms getting hacked right now? That you could write down, formalize, test in a court of law and which would last more than 6 months as an accepted definition? What about the China/Google hack in 2010? That was widely regarded as a groundbreaking attack by a nation state, but it started with an employee clicking a phishing link.