Comment by Arainach
2 years ago
Let's start by fixing the language. It's not stagnation, it's predictability.
Civil and mechanical engineering are not static fields. They come up with new materials, new methods, new ideas. They have tooling to understand the impact of a proposed change and standard ways to test and validate things. It is much easier to predict how long it will take to both design and build things. These are all good things.
We would all benefit from fewer cryptoAI startups and frameworks of the week and more robust toolchains tested and evolved over decades.
Why do you think such wrong things about civil and mechanical engineering.
Tell me about all the on time and under budget civil/mechanical engineering projects that are happening.
Do you think that just because they have physics to lean on that they can just like press solve and have accurate estimates spit out?
Edit: I totally agree that more long-lived battle tested software toolchains and libraries would be great though
How do you know things wouldn’t be much much worse if there were no standards for being a civil/structural engineer or architect that have been refined over long periods of time? Imagine municipalities taking the lowest bids by far thrown out there by any rando that decided they can make a few bucks by welding together the supports for a bridge or designing a really interesting building that will just cave in on itself a decade hence.
There are tons of physical engineers working on safety critical hardware that are not required to have some BS piece of paper that says they're safe.
You do not need a credential to work on EV charging infrastructure, rockets, crew capsules to ferry astronauts to the ISS, or many, many other things.
That's how you know, because those fields are not less safe. It's an easy comparison.
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It's not common anymore (like, in the past three decades), but "taking the lowest bid from some rando" is definitely still a thing.
Such delays are overwhelmingly political, not engineering. The local government demanding yet another environmental impact review is not an engineering cost - it is a scope change.
Scope change is really not a foreign concept in the field of software engineering, including politically driven
Licensure injects politics into the heart of engineering.