4 ms·

> Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. Increasingly I am of the opinion that software engineering

• stronglikedan 2mo ago
  > software engineering aught to be a licensed profession Only in certain industries, where outcomes can hurt people in any way. There's opportunity to engineer software in just about every industry, but I don't think a widget vendor that wants to connect to a WMS should be compelled to hire licensed anything. Of course, licensed engineers should cost more too.
  • wing-_-nuts 2mo ago
    It's not licensed per se, but in certain areas of the defense industry, one is restricted to using the 'DOD approved' subset of C++. Coders that know how to be productive within those constraints (and can pass clearance) are much more rare than your average code monkey
  • f6v 2mo ago
    Some pieces of software are classified as a "medical device" and require certain processes to be in place.
• groundzeros2015 2mo ago
  Credentialing lowers the skill floor and increase every other kind of friction. Civil engineering or medicine is hardly a desirable career model to follow. Btw doctors make mistakes that kill people all the time. It’s a top 3 cause of death in the US AND they often keep their jobs.
  • toss1 2mo ago
    >>doctors make mistakes that kill people all the time Yes, but they make a lot FEWER such mistakes than would people who could not pass the exams and maintain a license. The standard is not perfection; the standard is as good as practical and better than if nothing were done. Medical licensing definitely meets both of those criteria. Unless you are arguing that anyone who takes a ten-week "Medical Bootcamp" is ready to be a surgeon you would trust to operate on you or your children? Would you also be happy to commute to work over a bridge designed by someone with a 10-wk bootcamp in civil engineering? You have it exactly backwards — Credentialing RAISES the skill floor. It does not raise it to perfection, and "Certificates" in the computing industry are a joke, but real medical or engineering credentials certainly raise the floor higher than the software floor
    • groundzeros2015 2mo ago
      > they make a lot FEWER such mistakes than would people who could not pass the exams and maintain a license. I don’t know if that’s true. More schooling does not mean more trustworthy or careful doctors. And I suspect some negative trait selection. Milton Friedman wrote a PhD dissertation on the topic of medicine that I invite you to take a look at. > than if nothing were done. The alternative is not to invite people who have no experience to build bridges or perform surgeries. There are no credentials to work at Google. But you’ll find very skilled and capable people running large projects. Investors want capable people. Those people are vetted through their reputation in their professional circles. > Would you also be happy to commute to work over a bridge designed by someone with a 10-wk bootcamp in civil engineering? No. But I would like to drive over bridges from people with 30 years of bridge building experience over a 4-7 year degree. If you live in Europe you drive over bridges built without credentials all the time. > Credentialing RAISES the skill floor. Correct. That’s my mistake. The point is if cut off the bottom 20th percentile the field doesn’t get much better. Those people aren’t trusted leaders anyway. You do however lose a significant amount of upside. Including countless top performers from non traditional backgrounds, which is characteristic of computer hackers. You can maybe argue that the general public, unlike a corporation is not capable of vetting their own doctor, so the government classified those options for them. And that’s reasonable. But that does not apply at all to software engineers who don’t solicit public work. I have all the traditional credentials and this is not a projection of my own career.
• Silhouette 2mo ago
  The problem with making programming a regulated profession is who gets to define the regulations. You are probably imagining that it would be expert developers with a track record of success. I would bet on it being the people who write lots of blog posts and books about programming and give lots of conference keynotes - whether or not those people have any evidence base to support their advocated policies or any personal track record of delivering good software.
  • e2le 2mo ago
    > You are probably imagining that it would be expert developers with a track record of success. I'll admit I am unsure how such individuals would be chosen. I imagine it would be prudent to learn what processes are used by other licensed professions when choosing such individuals. > who write lots of blog posts and books about programming and give lots of conference keynotes I do not think people who write blog posts and give conference keynotes should be awarded with roles that regulate the profession because they write blog posts and give keynotes. I would hope that any regulation is evidence driven.
    • NateEag 2mo ago
      > I would hope that any regulation is evidence driven. Have you found existing regulation in any field that's evidence-driven? My impression is that regulation is not made in a way that has much to do with evidence, but I would be delighted to be shown evidence I'm wrong.
      • decimalenough 2mo ago
        Aviation comes to mind. Most aviation regulations exist because people died. It's hardly a perfect system, but the problem is mostly that it's too conservative and risk aware, making it difficult to impossible to innovate and ignoring the risk this creates. (The world's most popular light aircraft is the 1950s-vintage Cessna 172, mostly because it's impossibly slow and costly to get a reasonably priced modern competitor certified.)
• singpolyma3 2mo ago
  This sounds like a terrible idea. Do people need license to draw a picture or write a song? Why would we restrict other creative work in this way?
  • Barrin92 2mo ago
    >Why would we restrict other creative work in this way? Because it isn't creative work. Software underpins payment processors, medical services, emergency alerts, infrastructure. In the UK not long ago a ransomware attack took the healthcare system offline and surgeries had to be postponed. in 2021 the Colonial Pipeline attack took 50% of the US East Coast's oil supply offline. The entire German train system died a few weeks ago for half a day because of a software bug. People's entire communication is in digital services, all of their private data, the economy grinds to a halt or national security is impacted monthly now by either deliberate attacks or just bugs.
    • deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    • singpolyma3 2mo ago
      Then license healthcare systems, payment processors, etc. Not humans
      • Barrin92 2mo ago
        you license both. When you go in for surgery your hospital is accredited and the surgeon who operates on you is licensed. I don't even understand what you're trying to argue, you're okay with being operated on by a guy they found on craigslist as long as the hospital has a license? We should bridges let bridges be built by engineers who took a few courses on Khan Academy? Of course professionals themselves need to be licensed, how else is any company supposed to have any confidence in who they employ or any legal security?
        • singpolyma3 2mo ago
• WalterBright 2mo ago
  > software engineering aught to be a licensed profession, similar to civil engineers, medical professionals, or lawyers. My experience with civil engineers and lawyers is many of them aren't worth spit. Licensing is not a magical cert that proves competence. BTW, if you hire a lawyer in WA state, be sure to ask if they passed the bar. The state has been licensing lawyers who don't pass it.
  • cucumber3732842 2mo ago
    Competence is tangential. They're happy to allow the idiots, so long as they aren't so stupid it makes the organization or the government look bad. The way licensing fundamentally works is industry basically strikes a bargain with government to it's benefit. Government lets the licensing organization run a supply cartel and collect protection money (dues, test fees, whatever) so long as they promise to enforce (low) minimum standards along the way. Government gives licensees favorable treatment in court (statutory limits to liability, licensed professionals opinions are more equal than average peasants, etc, etc), etc. And all this stands so long as they do whatever the government's rules say (to the detriment of the customers). And of course the professionals make money hand over fist (or at least more than they're worth) in the process because the licensing organization constrains supply. Society gets just enough scraps to provide the political will to get it done and keep it rolling (the low minimum standards).
  • jambalaya8 2mo ago
    ...or you wind up with people that know the same answers to the same questions; great for a job repeatedly answering the same questions, pointless for jobs requiring original approaches, beyond a certain point. In law, you'd better know the law... but there are so many ways to work in tech, many with no appropriate titles, many pockets of it which would not survive a certification path.
• coderenegade 2mo ago
  It's probably worth distinguishing software engineering from the ability to program. Programming is a skill that is similar to reading and writing in that it's a type of literacy, and it shares a common theme with literacy in that even though most of us can read and write, not everyone is good at it. Professions that leverage that unit of literacy build on top of it, and take literacy as a given. For instance, a lawyer spends most of their time reading and writing, but no one would ever say "you can read and write? Have a crack on our legal team". It's a particular type of writing, and the writing is really a means to an end. This is a distinction that is lost in software development. Every engineering discipline now learns programming, but the ability to write code shouldn't be a license to write software in the same way that knowing how to read and write doesn't just grant you the ability to join a legal team and start writing contracts.
• mcmcmc 2mo ago
  I think a more effective way of enforcing the licensing would be adding a cyber insurance requirement to sell software or internet services commercially to some threshold of users. Insurers could give a prime rate to licensed developers and offer a service to have their own engineers certify software from firms without credentials for a higher rate. Direct licensing requirements from the state are prone to abuse via regulatory capture. Big or entrenched players can give to politicians who’ll change the rules in their favor, setting who needs a license and who can get one. The profit maximizing incentive for insurance is a double edged sword, but if there’s a government backed insurer that just does the prime rate for licensed developers, the commercial market can build off that and fill in the gaps. If you need a special license and insurance to drive a commercial truck on public roadways, why not the same for commercial traffic on the public internet? A good way to drive adoption from nontechnical folks could be something like the lock icon in the browser for TLS. Issue a domain cert for certified software, you can go to their website and confirm they are compliant right away. People are free to publish and use non-certified apps, they just won’t unless they have a reason to trust them.
• nocman 2mo ago
  Licensing is not a substitute for hiring competent people that actually care about the quality of their work, and then giving them the time, resources, and support they actually need to do it. Government involvement almost always just makes the problem worse, not better. There is a place for control in some areas (medical, military applications, etc), but I think broad-sweeping regulation would do far more damage than good.
• CM30 2mo ago
  Eh, I've never been a fan of licensing simply because software engineering is a vast field with huge differences in the impact your work might have. Like sure, if you're writing software for medical professionals, or lawyers, or aviation companies then I can see that being something you'd want people licensed for. A major bug in a pacemaker or plane's autopilot system is a huge deal that could injure or kill a lot of people. At the same time though, a lot of software engineering/programming work is extremely low stakes, and I think expecting that to be licensed would be kinda ridiculous. Having someone need to be licensed to create a small business WordPress site, or local desktop software to solve a personal need, or most video games in general feels kind of absurd. Do people need to be licensed to make say, Minecraft mods or hack a game from the 80s? The difference with the legal and medical industry is that if someone is incompetent or screws up in those fields, there are almost certainly going to be negative, if not dire consequences for those involved. If someone screws up in tech, then there may be dire consequences in some industries/sub-fields, or no/positive consequences in others.