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As probably the only person here who actually did make autonomous remote heart surgery code (Ada), very early in my career as a novice, I disagree with the idea

As probably the only person here who actually did make autonomous remote heart surgery code (Ada), very early in my career as a novice, I disagree with the idea of licensing _programmers_. What is needed is licenses for those who _deploy_ software in critical applications. They should be audited to hell and back and face catastrophic liability for failure. We already are moving there, creating a small number of well paid, highly skilled senior positions who have 40+ years in software and full ISO9000/27000. It's a chartered quality assurance role that overlaps cyber-security/safety and resilience engineering. And we must remember, that despite construction work being regulated to the hilt, we still got the "cladding scandal" and Grenfell Tower fire in the UK. Software "safety inspection", where appropriate, must also be a thing.

cormacrelf 5y ago
That's why engineers have tiered systems where a number of unlicensed people can do the work, but a licensed one has to sign off on the work. Proposing similar licensing schemes to those in civil engineering basically means "do that". Nobody's interested in restricting access to Vim and python.exe to only the most learned and wise. This is why I framed the discussion about password hashing as being about a senior getting what amounts to an intern to do incredibly sensitive work without oversight. Something the article did poorly is its analogy between software engineers and solo tradespeople. That's the wrong end. There is very little danger in having solo software engineers working unlicensed; they're out there making Wordpress websites and apps that are also basically information websites. Solo tradespeople are doing electrical work that might start a fire and kill a family. There is a big difference at the low end and it is bad to compare those two classes of worker.

cormacrelf 5y ago

That's why engineers have tiered systems where a number of unlicensed people can do the work, but a licensed one has to sign off on the work. Proposing similar licensing schemes to those in civil engineering basically means "do that". Nobody's interested in restricting access to Vim and python.exe to only the most learned and wise. This is why I framed the discussion about password hashing as being about a senior getting what amounts to an intern to do incredibly sensitive work without oversight. Something the article did poorly is its analogy between software engineers and solo tradespeople. That's the wrong end. There is very little danger in having solo software engineers working unlicensed; they're out there making Wordpress websites and apps that are also basically information websites. Solo tradespeople are doing electrical work that might start a fire and kill a family. There is a big difference at the low end and it is bad to compare those two classes of worker.