Comment by FatherOfCurses

In my very humble opinion, the impact that software has on our lives is getting to the point where software engineering should become a true profession like the other engineering branches (electrical, mechanical, etc).

There should be things like professional certifications that engineers have to maintain through continuous education, a professional code of ethics, a board of review, and other functions.

My reasoning is that we are at the point where a software "engineer" can make a mistake that can have the same impact as a civil engineer making a bad calculation and causing a bridge collapse.

There's different levels to this, of course. An app for booking restaurant reservations wouldn't need that much oversight. But we've seen some outages having massive impacts that quite frankly did not happy twenty years ago.