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is there no individual accountability regime in the US? in the UK, as an engineer, if I'd built this I would expect the regulator to come after me personally f
by blibble 2y ago
is there no individual accountability regime in the US?
in the UK, as an engineer, if I'd built this I would expect the regulator to come after me personally for not ensuring the system had adequate controls to protect clients money/investments
with a potentially unlimited fine + prison time
- HPsquared 2y agoDepends if the particular activity is regulated or not.
- blibble 2y agoa stock trading platform, as described in the article?
- hluska 2y agoIn North America, “engineer” doesn’t necessarily mean a software engineer with a professional certification. Software developers have taken to calling themselves engineers. Whether engineering professional bodies should start going after people for this or not is a different topic. But it’s entirely possible for someone who calls themselves an engineer to not actually be a certified engineer. So the activity wouldn’t be regulated because the person isn’t part of a professional body that regulates members. In that case, lack of competence would be a civil issue unless it resulted in something criminal.
- AlotOfReading 2y agoThere isn't even a way to get certified as a professional engineer for software in the US.
- blibble 2y agoit's what you're doing (your "function") that's regulated not your job title, or piece of paper that you have that says you're X, Y or Z
- AlotOfReading 2y ago"Professional Engineer" is a protected title that requires licensing to be used for a discipline. That licensing process does not exist for software in the US right now.
- eddautomates 2y agoThere was but no one did it, so they stopped: https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineering-exam/ https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineerin... It is still possible in the UK and I assume EU (chartered engineer and the EU-alternative). So the reason it isn’t a PE-discipline is uptake, not the work itself.
- HPsquared 2y agoCould well be the entity actually selling the services.
- masfuerte 2y agoHas that ever happened? It's incredibly hard to prosecute directors in the UK for obvious malfeasance. I have never heard of a software engineer being sanctioned for crap code.
- blibble 2y agofor engineers[1] it is relatively new, having only been introduced in the last couple of years [1]: technically those performing a Certified Function
- intelVISA 2y agounless the engineer was provably malicious wouldn't it be responsibility of the product owner? Ownership usually entails accountability, they could order proper QA?
- that_guy_iain 2y agoIt would be nearly impossible to prosecute for just bad code. It would require more and is limited very small scope of people.
- mikewarot 2y ago>is there no individual accountability regime in the US? Here in the US, programmers like to call themselves Engineers, forcing everyone else to use the term "Professional Engineer" or "Licensed Engineer" or some other modifier before their title. I hate it, I wish they would stop, but it's not going to happen. Software here is a wild, wild, West. The motto most live by is "move fast and break things"... even when those things are people's lives.
- dghlsakjg 2y agoThe PE thing is more than 100 years old in the US. By 1947 every state had a PE licensure program. It has nothing to do with programmers.
- salawat 2y agoIn fact it was lobbied in order to disinclude software engineering from it's purview in most states.
- elzbardico 2y agoThere’s a few more professionals that are called engineers. Railroad locomotive operators, ship engine operators. The name precedes the creation of licensed tertiary education level engineers. A lot of people seems to ignore the fact that licensed professions that require an accredited diploma in a tertiary level education program is a relatively recent feature of our societies.
- woah 2y agoThe original meaning of engineer was an idle British aristocrat who liked to tinker with things that went whiz and bang in the garden shed. Just a guy who really liked to mess around with engines.
- dylan604 2y agoI leave you with the 2008 financial crisis as exhibit A on exactly how nobody gets in trouble for lack of financial accountability
- jfengel 2y agoThe secret is to have everyone in on it. Everyone is guilty but nobody is quite culpable enough to punish. The low level guys were just doing their jobs, and each individual transaction was mostly legal. A few weren't but it's hard to sort out which ones. Maybe the management should be responsible for ensuring that nobody ever did anything illegal, but they can't really supervise everything all the time, can they? Poof. Guilt is just a rounding error that all rounds down to zero. The government passes some new regulations to prevent that particular scenario from happening again, and the same people set about finding a new scam.
- BlueTemplar 2y agoThis kind of still works for things that aren't real like money or law because they are societal constructs, but for the cases involving the real world, there's no escape from consequences (only dumping them onto someone else to deal with).
- dylan604 2y agoIt's also the thing for bigTech to do as well. They break all of the societal norms to make the world they want, then "work" with regulators to make it okay for them to exist yet make it extremely difficult for anyone to follow as they will have to deal with the regulations. Once you get to the top, the act of pulling up the ladders behind you is "just" self preservation.
- blibble 2y agothey thought about this there's a separate certification function for managing certification function employees, and they're jointly liable for anything they do
- 2y ago
- lubujackson 2y agoI don't see how a rank and file programmer would ever be personally responsible for their code. You can blame management for forcing untested or known flawed logic, but not some shmoe that pushes an "off by 1" bug while working weekends and late nights with no testing and hard deadlines.
- SoftTalker 2y agoPushing a bug, yeah that happens. Deliberately implementing a financial system that ignores established (and probably legally required) accounting practices? That's kind of like a structural engineer willfully disregarding the building code because that's what management asked for.
- solid_fuel 2y agoProgrammers should ensure they understand the requirements of what they are being asked to build, and not just blindly build things. If I was asked to build an accounting system, I would insist on speaking with an accountant to understand the requirements. If I was asked to work on a medical imagining system, I would want to be working with a qualified radiologist and probably a PhD holder in a relevant field too. Overconfidence can quite literally be fatal.
- patmorgan23 2y agoNot for software that I'm aware of. For certain regulated professions there is, if a building falls down due to a bad design the professional engineer (PE) that signed and sealed the plans can be held personally liable.
- badcppdev 2y agoCan you please provide a reference to the regulators coming after an engineer in the UK. Also you say regulations in the UK have been changed recently. I'm not aware of regulations that apply to software engineers.
- arethuza 2y agoAre you a professionally qualified engineer?