4 ms·

What's really needed is an official Engineering qualification for programmers, like you leaglly have to have if you're an Electrician or Gas Engineer, etc. Liab

What's really needed is an official Engineering qualification for programmers, like you leaglly have to have if you're an Electrician or Gas Engineer, etc. Liability Insurance in case of damaging bugs. Literally anyone can call themselves a Software Engineer, which one the one hand is great because it's accessible, but also a curse in terms of making it a respected profession.

contingencies 2y ago
No. This is often stated, but I believe provable systems make far more sense than provable people. Exclusionary qualifications and gatekeeping are an anachronism that needs to die. It's a positive thing that computing has lead the way in this area. Other facets of engineering need to do the same.
- mrkeen 2y ago
  It's impossible to even aim for provable systems when the dominant paradigm is moving fast.
- secondcoming 2y ago
  Would you let someone - whose only qualifications is watching YT videos and tinkering around their own home - wire up your house and install your gas appliances? Would your insurer accept that?
  - poincaredisk 2y ago
    That's equivalent to asking if I would let a hobbyist programmer who just learned python to write his first computer game design and implement my production system. A better comparison would be "would I let someone who self-learned wiring up houses, and then spent five years working under an expert, before finally branching on his own, wire up my house". And the answer is yes.
kstrauser 2y ago
If you design a bridge that collapses in a way that could be anticipated, you screwed up. Software can fail in ways no one's thought of yet, as evidenced by us still finding new classes of bugs. And even when you write perfect software, it's impossible to know that it's going to evaluate correctly when built with an arbitrary compiler on an arbitrary OS running on an arbitrary hardware platform. Something perfectly fine on Clang/macOS/ARM might be busted on GCC/Linux/x86. Engineers have to be responsible for their work. If you held software engineers to that same legal standard, the occupation would be sued out of existence within a year, even for people who are doing everything possible to do it right.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  As a devil's advocate: engineers are so often told to not do things the right way (skip tests, go faster, implement ethically questionable code, etc) that a license can give an engineer some weight. Of course if they ignore a licensed engineer, they'd have their version of "Against medical advice" to sign off that liability to the company. Sure, there's still be unknown unknowns that come up and screw over the engineer, but I imagine a lot of the lawsuits would be redirected to the companies that prioritized shipping any kind of slop over all these engineering principles.
  - kazinator 2y ago
    If you are a licensed engineer that happens to be doing software, you can probably play that card.
- kazinator 2y ago
  Those people would be the first casualties, because they would be working where the stakes are high.
toast0 2y ago
IMHO, the actual barrier to entry to writing software is so low that trying to raise artificial barriers is unlikely to be succesful. Especially in a world where disclaiming liability is the norm on all sorts of agreements, why should general software be different? Software related to life safety tends to have real liability attached.
- em-bee 2y ago
  why? i don't think it's any different from requiring a degree. if a qualification exists it most likely can be tied into a degree. like in law for example. you study law and then you pass the bar exam. seems pretty straight forward
nuancebydefault 2y ago
In case of software development, plain old common sense tends to take you a lot further than some certification. It is more easy to spot the professional fault leading to a gas leak than catching the professional fault of creating software resulting in subtle race conditions.
- secondcoming 2y ago
  It's not just spotting leaks, you can't even install gas applicances without a professional qualification even though most of it is common sense. Yet, literally anyone can work on any type of software without having any sort of proof they're competent in that area. It's all hope and trust.
  - nuancebydefault 2y ago
    I expressed myself unclearly. The gas cerified person gets repercussions because someone found leaks in the pipe fittings this certified person made. The leak is a smoking gun. OTOH The software dev, certified or not, will not get repercussions because of their racey constructs, since it is much harder to point out they did not follow some certified procedure other than some (non airtight) tests and reviews before release. There's no smoking gun pointing to uncertified way-of-work. There's only this one in a million happenstance of a race condition making the system fail. That's where the common sense comes in, only that will prevent/solve possible race condition. There simply is no certified way about it like in pipe fitting.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
People don't care about "respect" if they getting a 250k salary for it. For that level of salary people will flock to sanitation services in a heart beat (aka pickup trash and dog through dumps for a living). I kinda sorta agree with you, but I see two immediate issues 1. There's such a variety of domains in software. And even in a domain you're always finding odd, unique problems that no test prepares you for. There's too many skills each domain needs to boil down to one universal test 2. The main reason I'd love a license is to cut down on interview gauntlets. But I'm too cynical to believe we still won't just end up with 4-7 stages of something else. Or even the exact same damm thing. What's the point of a license if no one trusts it over their cruddy beauracracy they call an "interview"?

contingencies 2y ago

No. This is often stated, but I believe provable systems make far more sense than provable people. Exclusionary qualifications and gatekeeping are an anachronism that needs to die. It's a positive thing that computing has lead the way in this area. Other facets of engineering need to do the same.

mrkeen 2y ago
It's impossible to even aim for provable systems when the dominant paradigm is moving fast.
secondcoming 2y ago
Would you let someone - whose only qualifications is watching YT videos and tinkering around their own home - wire up your house and install your gas appliances? Would your insurer accept that?
- poincaredisk 2y ago
  That's equivalent to asking if I would let a hobbyist programmer who just learned python to write his first computer game design and implement my production system. A better comparison would be "would I let someone who self-learned wiring up houses, and then spent five years working under an expert, before finally branching on his own, wire up my house". And the answer is yes.

kstrauser 2y ago

If you design a bridge that collapses in a way that could be anticipated, you screwed up. Software can fail in ways no one's thought of yet, as evidenced by us still finding new classes of bugs. And even when you write perfect software, it's impossible to know that it's going to evaluate correctly when built with an arbitrary compiler on an arbitrary OS running on an arbitrary hardware platform. Something perfectly fine on Clang/macOS/ARM might be busted on GCC/Linux/x86. Engineers have to be responsible for their work. If you held software engineers to that same legal standard, the occupation would be sued out of existence within a year, even for people who are doing everything possible to do it right.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
As a devil's advocate: engineers are so often told to not do things the right way (skip tests, go faster, implement ethically questionable code, etc) that a license can give an engineer some weight. Of course if they ignore a licensed engineer, they'd have their version of "Against medical advice" to sign off that liability to the company. Sure, there's still be unknown unknowns that come up and screw over the engineer, but I imagine a lot of the lawsuits would be redirected to the companies that prioritized shipping any kind of slop over all these engineering principles.
- kazinator 2y ago
  If you are a licensed engineer that happens to be doing software, you can probably play that card.
kazinator 2y ago
Those people would be the first casualties, because they would be working where the stakes are high.

toast0 2y ago

IMHO, the actual barrier to entry to writing software is so low that trying to raise artificial barriers is unlikely to be succesful. Especially in a world where disclaiming liability is the norm on all sorts of agreements, why should general software be different? Software related to life safety tends to have real liability attached.

em-bee 2y ago
why? i don't think it's any different from requiring a degree. if a qualification exists it most likely can be tied into a degree. like in law for example. you study law and then you pass the bar exam. seems pretty straight forward

nuancebydefault 2y ago

In case of software development, plain old common sense tends to take you a lot further than some certification. It is more easy to spot the professional fault leading to a gas leak than catching the professional fault of creating software resulting in subtle race conditions.

secondcoming 2y ago
It's not just spotting leaks, you can't even install gas applicances without a professional qualification even though most of it is common sense. Yet, literally anyone can work on any type of software without having any sort of proof they're competent in that area. It's all hope and trust.
- nuancebydefault 2y ago
  I expressed myself unclearly. The gas cerified person gets repercussions because someone found leaks in the pipe fittings this certified person made. The leak is a smoking gun. OTOH The software dev, certified or not, will not get repercussions because of their racey constructs, since it is much harder to point out they did not follow some certified procedure other than some (non airtight) tests and reviews before release. There's no smoking gun pointing to uncertified way-of-work. There's only this one in a million happenstance of a race condition making the system fail. That's where the common sense comes in, only that will prevent/solve possible race condition. There simply is no certified way about it like in pipe fitting.

johnnyanmac 2y ago

People don't care about "respect" if they getting a 250k salary for it. For that level of salary people will flock to sanitation services in a heart beat (aka pickup trash and dog through dumps for a living). I kinda sorta agree with you, but I see two immediate issues 1. There's such a variety of domains in software. And even in a domain you're always finding odd, unique problems that no test prepares you for. There's too many skills each domain needs to boil down to one universal test 2. The main reason I'd love a license is to cut down on interview gauntlets. But I'm too cynical to believe we still won't just end up with 4-7 stages of something else. Or even the exact same damm thing. What's the point of a license if no one trusts it over their cruddy beauracracy they call an "interview"?