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Comment by pnathan

2 years ago

I'm more than happy to sign onto a reasonable certification. Many good reasons for it. I am, personally, fond of the idea that an ABET certified BSCS should be ground floor level. Other ideas have been floated...

But this particular work is really, really, really awful. For reasons that are well documented.

In the most fundamental sense, the IEEE doesn't understand what professional SWEs need, in appropriate portions. It confuses SWE with PM, badly. And it has done so, historically. To the point of wide condemnation.

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pnathan

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nradov  2 years ago

What exactly about the SWEBOK is awful? Could you give us a link to the documentation of reasons? Which sections of the SWEBOK cover topics that professional SWEs don't need to understand, and which major topics are missing?

It isn't possible to be a competent engineer, beyond the most junior levels, without having a pretty solid grasp of project management. You might not need to be a good project manager but in order to make competent engineering decisions you have to understand how your tasks fit into the whole.

  • pnathan  2 years ago

    The basic problem is you're wrong and also right: it all depends.

    That is widely understood as the senior+ swe mantra.

    The SWEBOK, on the contrary, asserts "it does not depend" and that in a sense is the core problem.

    For a detailed takedown, the ACM's is the most famous, there are others that v3 sparked. I'm sure v4 is sparking it's own detailed analysis ... I'm bowing out to go do my day job now. :)

  • kragen  2 years ago

    A comprehensive list of the SWEBOK's problems would run to tens of thousands of pages, so it will surely never be written. But here's a summary of my own comments in this thread on the topic. I think they cover most of the important aspects.

    As its Introduction clearly explains, the SWEBOK is primarily a work of political advocacy. One of its political goals is a particular division of labor in software that has been tried, has failed, and has largely been abandoned, as I explained in https://www.hillelwayne.com/talks/crossover-project/, but this is still a controversial point. So I picked three fields which I hope everyone can agree are real engineering. The "software engineering" that the SWEBOK is about, and that Dijkstra was criticizing, is not the engineering of software and is not in fact engineering at all.