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Who is "we"? When engineers are not subject to licensure, don't be surprised when management, pushed by bean counters, let the bean counters make the decisions

Who is "we"? When engineers are not subject to licensure, don't be surprised when management, pushed by bean counters, let the bean counters make the decisions. Subject engineers to licensure, including ethics clauses, including clauses for building for repairability and minimum expected product lifetimes. Legally protect engineers from dismissal or retribution for invoking these clauses. Then see how much crap we continue to build.

drdaeman 3y ago
And then, sadly, you’ll most likely get beaten by some foreign country’s slap-shit-together-and-ship-it junk. Because people don’t think in terms of TCO and product lifespans, they see that “-30%” and “$X.99” and buy things that possibly even unable to do what they really need them to do, because ad made a different impression. Solving junk requires much more than licensing and certifications (unless somehow it’s done globally, worldwide). It also bridging the consumer awareness/competence gap somehow.
- glitchc 3y ago
  If medicine can achieve a gatekeeping function, so can engineering.
- solatic 3y ago
  I would have agreed with you before COVID and the Russo-Ukrainian war. Today, the world is slowly changing direction on globalization. There is increasing understanding, at the national policy level, of the value of more localized supply chains, where local manufacturing is encouraged through tariffs. This is besides newfound focus on privacy and data sovereignty, and the race by cloud providers to build globally-accessible datacenters all over the globe. The next step will be a focus on localizing not just the data but the software itself: the operators, the code, and finally developers. > unless somehow it’s done globally, worldwide The vehicle for this is the WTO, or at least, it used to be, before the US decided to take its teeth away. Giving it teeth requires moral leadership. It doesn't happen overnight, but it starts with licensure, then working through the WTO to establish new rules and tariffs for violators.
  - drdaeman 3y ago
    > Today, the world is slowly changing direction on globalization. I'm not so sure about this. The world is slowly realizing heavy dependence on exports of autocratic countries was not exactly the brightest idea - and this superficially polite wording is very intentional here, because that's how it goes. Even the war hadn't stopped trading - worse, on the contrary, Russian trading boomed after the invasion. And it's not something unique that money beats anything - oil deals are advertised at climate conferences, and somehow this doesn't surprise me at all. And I think WTO also wouldn't do a thing that won't benefit its stakeholders - not the consumers. There's barely any global consensus about anything important, and international institutions like UN look dysfunctional at best. And in terms of money, cheap junk beats consistently anything else out of the market. The homeostasis of price-regulation-quality is very hard to maintain, and consumer products either fall down towards cheap junk extremum, or towards regulatory capture extremum (but still junk under the hood - just see how banking and medical apps are doing). Sorry to be this pessimistic - I really wish I'd be wrong here. But unless somehow there's bigger money in making changes than in maintaining the status quo, I doubt anything would happen.
badcppdev 3y ago
Step 1. Define software engineering in a world of no-code, low-code, and AI code generation.
concordDance 3y ago
Note that this will make society's ability to build things even worse. The UK has gotten worse and worse at large scale construction over time as laws and rules and culture have gotten more conservative. Near me a small bridge is being widened. This takes a year and a half and £160 million, partly due to well intentioned rules. For example, one that says you need to have two attendants guiding traffic at every location people could get to the site, which means 12 very bored men standing around all day doing nothing at the two intersections at the edge of the build site. Rules made from our ivory towers can't take into account all the factors that will actually occur in our fractally complex reality, particularly as times and situations change. The impossible task gets even harder when second and third order effects come into play. For example, if a license is required to work, that license can be lost if something ever goes wrong and firing for not approving something is impossible then a second order effect could be that engineers will have every incentive to never approve things, requiring every safety feature rather than taking the time and effort to determine which are needed in the situation. The third order effect is a gradual shift of engineering culture towards being more conservative, as being more than average levels of risk taking means you can't just point at what everyone else does and say "Best practice!".
someguy5281 3y ago
> Subject engineers to licensure That'd be great. It can also finally define a standard for things like clean code, development cycles and and design patterns. Companies keep claiming to promote these things but it seems to be just a lot of equivocations.
- robocat 3y ago
  Because licensing is working so well in other disciplines? Magic fairy dust! Look at some civil engineering disasters: licensing doesn't prevent disasters.
  - swiftcoder 3y ago
    > Look at some civil engineering disasters: licensing doesn't prevent disasters. I'd suggest that you are judging the effectiveness on the wrong criteria here. It's impossible to foresee all distasters - the goal is to enact mechanisms to mitigate the human cost of distasters, and even more importantly, prevent the second and third occurrences of the same distaster... (which we seem decently good at)
    - robocat 3y ago
      Licensing doesn't prevent similar disasters from happening. Licensing is simply too low-level to prevent problems. Licensing is a mechanism to scapegoat individual engineers. It doesn't fix issues with systems. And the penalty of losing a license is simply too cheap compared against the cost of major accidents. Engineering projects are usually performed by businesses, often across jurisdictional boundaries. Licensing is usually a monopoly within a jurisdiction. Avoiding accidents requires solutions at the level of a business activity: and it needs to cover all the aspects of the activity (not just the coalface of engineering, but the management and sales and every other aspect that can affect safety). If software engineering requires licenses then open source cannot be used. Good luck starting from scratch and introducing other risks of proprietary solutions! An example: a Lambourghini tractor has a fault in the steering software that causes the tractor to overturn and kills a farmer in Nabraska. How do you expect software engineering licensing to prevent that?
eru 3y ago
You have a lot of faith in the bureaucrats who are supposed to dream up and enforce those rules. There are honest and competent civil servants, of course. But they are a precious and limited resource for any society, and should only be expended on the most critical tasks. I'd rather have those people work on important stuff (say, criminal justice), than arbitrate microwave popcorn buttons.

drdaeman 3y ago

And then, sadly, you’ll most likely get beaten by some foreign country’s slap-shit-together-and-ship-it junk. Because people don’t think in terms of TCO and product lifespans, they see that “-30%” and “$X.99” and buy things that possibly even unable to do what they really need them to do, because ad made a different impression. Solving junk requires much more than licensing and certifications (unless somehow it’s done globally, worldwide). It also bridging the consumer awareness/competence gap somehow.

glitchc 3y ago
If medicine can achieve a gatekeeping function, so can engineering.
solatic 3y ago
I would have agreed with you before COVID and the Russo-Ukrainian war. Today, the world is slowly changing direction on globalization. There is increasing understanding, at the national policy level, of the value of more localized supply chains, where local manufacturing is encouraged through tariffs. This is besides newfound focus on privacy and data sovereignty, and the race by cloud providers to build globally-accessible datacenters all over the globe. The next step will be a focus on localizing not just the data but the software itself: the operators, the code, and finally developers. > unless somehow it’s done globally, worldwide The vehicle for this is the WTO, or at least, it used to be, before the US decided to take its teeth away. Giving it teeth requires moral leadership. It doesn't happen overnight, but it starts with licensure, then working through the WTO to establish new rules and tariffs for violators.
- drdaeman 3y ago
  > Today, the world is slowly changing direction on globalization. I'm not so sure about this. The world is slowly realizing heavy dependence on exports of autocratic countries was not exactly the brightest idea - and this superficially polite wording is very intentional here, because that's how it goes. Even the war hadn't stopped trading - worse, on the contrary, Russian trading boomed after the invasion. And it's not something unique that money beats anything - oil deals are advertised at climate conferences, and somehow this doesn't surprise me at all. And I think WTO also wouldn't do a thing that won't benefit its stakeholders - not the consumers. There's barely any global consensus about anything important, and international institutions like UN look dysfunctional at best. And in terms of money, cheap junk beats consistently anything else out of the market. The homeostasis of price-regulation-quality is very hard to maintain, and consumer products either fall down towards cheap junk extremum, or towards regulatory capture extremum (but still junk under the hood - just see how banking and medical apps are doing). Sorry to be this pessimistic - I really wish I'd be wrong here. But unless somehow there's bigger money in making changes than in maintaining the status quo, I doubt anything would happen.

badcppdev 3y ago

Step 1. Define software engineering in a world of no-code, low-code, and AI code generation.

concordDance 3y ago

Note that this will make society's ability to build things even worse. The UK has gotten worse and worse at large scale construction over time as laws and rules and culture have gotten more conservative. Near me a small bridge is being widened. This takes a year and a half and £160 million, partly due to well intentioned rules. For example, one that says you need to have two attendants guiding traffic at every location people could get to the site, which means 12 very bored men standing around all day doing nothing at the two intersections at the edge of the build site. Rules made from our ivory towers can't take into account all the factors that will actually occur in our fractally complex reality, particularly as times and situations change. The impossible task gets even harder when second and third order effects come into play. For example, if a license is required to work, that license can be lost if something ever goes wrong and firing for not approving something is impossible then a second order effect could be that engineers will have every incentive to never approve things, requiring every safety feature rather than taking the time and effort to determine which are needed in the situation. The third order effect is a gradual shift of engineering culture towards being more conservative, as being more than average levels of risk taking means you can't just point at what everyone else does and say "Best practice!".

someguy5281 3y ago

> Subject engineers to licensure That'd be great. It can also finally define a standard for things like clean code, development cycles and and design patterns. Companies keep claiming to promote these things but it seems to be just a lot of equivocations.

robocat 3y ago
Because licensing is working so well in other disciplines? Magic fairy dust! Look at some civil engineering disasters: licensing doesn't prevent disasters.
- swiftcoder 3y ago
  > Look at some civil engineering disasters: licensing doesn't prevent disasters. I'd suggest that you are judging the effectiveness on the wrong criteria here. It's impossible to foresee all distasters - the goal is to enact mechanisms to mitigate the human cost of distasters, and even more importantly, prevent the second and third occurrences of the same distaster... (which we seem decently good at)
  - robocat 3y ago
    Licensing doesn't prevent similar disasters from happening. Licensing is simply too low-level to prevent problems. Licensing is a mechanism to scapegoat individual engineers. It doesn't fix issues with systems. And the penalty of losing a license is simply too cheap compared against the cost of major accidents. Engineering projects are usually performed by businesses, often across jurisdictional boundaries. Licensing is usually a monopoly within a jurisdiction. Avoiding accidents requires solutions at the level of a business activity: and it needs to cover all the aspects of the activity (not just the coalface of engineering, but the management and sales and every other aspect that can affect safety). If software engineering requires licenses then open source cannot be used. Good luck starting from scratch and introducing other risks of proprietary solutions! An example: a Lambourghini tractor has a fault in the steering software that causes the tractor to overturn and kills a farmer in Nabraska. How do you expect software engineering licensing to prevent that?

eru 3y ago

You have a lot of faith in the bureaucrats who are supposed to dream up and enforce those rules. There are honest and competent civil servants, of course. But they are a precious and limited resource for any society, and should only be expended on the most critical tasks. I'd rather have those people work on important stuff (say, criminal justice), than arbitrate microwave popcorn buttons.