Comment by Klonoar
6 hours ago
> Fwiw, a non-technical employee in my workplace has begun submitting ai-generated prs to internal repos I maintain & they're of excellent quality, with review feedback graciously received & expediently addressed, so this isn't a matter of the idiots not being technical, it's an attitude problem.
It is hard for me to imagine another engineering discipline that would be totally fine accepting work from those who don't have the actual engineering background required to do the work.
If I had to push this take to the extreme: software engineers never learned class solidarity and it's now biting the industry in the ass.
Man, you must hate those handymen who put up YouTube videos showing how to do basic home maintenance. A truly class-conscious handyman would insist that the homeowner hire them to replace a light switch.
How this is equivalent at all? The proper equivalence would be "You should be happy a random passerby decided to re-wire your home after watching a youtube tutorial and thank him accordingly".
There certainly exists a class of electricians who believe that homeowners shouldn't be changing a light switch, and jurisdictions exist where a permit is required to do so.
I have seen some homeowners who shouldn't own a screwdriver or a hammer try to do minor electrical work. It was not pretty.
I've often thought that it would make sense to have a DIY electrician's certificate, proving that you know how to do basic home wiring, such as outlets, switches, ceiling lamps, basic solar (DC and AC), installing new wire, load calculations, and connecting to breakers in a service panel
I have no problems pulling a permit and going through an electrical inspection.
Come on, are you really going to strawman "engineering should be inherently disqualifying" into "so people shouldn't DIY in their own home"? Please try a little bit harder.
I’m not strawmanning anything. I’m pointing out what I believe to be ridiculous gatekeeping. Software engineering isn’t some holy magic that must be kept from the masses.
I can go on YouTube and get step-by-step instructions on how to safely wire an entire house. In many jurisdictions I would even be allowed to do that.
I can get instructions on how to completely redo a bathroom, down to the studs and up through the waterproofing and tiling. I can get instructions on how to do foundation repair, which might be a bit much for me but can help me ask the right questions to keep the contractor I hired honest.
These are all examples of experts acting as “traitors” to their particular group. In reality, technology enables both specialization and despecialization. Some people try to cling to their specializations and cry “class warfare” when threatened.
12 replies →
> hard for me to imagine another engineering discipline....
Well, that's already the case because you cant just call yourself an engineer and start signing off on projects. It's a legally protected title in a lot of places. You need a professional license, and can face legal liability for your decisions.
Software engineering is not engineering. Software craftmanship or even architecture would be a more accurate term. There are no devs that will go to prison if what they produce has, say, a major vulnerability. That alone disqualifies it from being engineering. There's no licensure, there's no liability, so already software development is not gatekept in any way like other engineering disciplines.
I mean, just go into an aerospace engineering office and say you want to move fast and break things, you'll get laughed out of the room.
No idea what you mean by class solidarity. There are only two; the capital owning class, and then everyone else (the working class). Most devs are working class just like everyone else.
Unless you're proposing that software should be gatekept to the level of other engineering disciplines?
> Well, that's already the case because you cant just call yourself an engineer and start signing off on projects. It's a legally protected title in a lot of places. You need a professional license, and can face legal liability for your decisions.
This was part of the implication of my point, yes.
> No idea what you mean by class solidarity. There are only two; the capital owning class, and then everyone else (the working class). Most devs are working class just like everyone else.
Yes, albeit a highly compensated portion of the working class. Software engineers should protect their own field a bit more.
> Unless you're proposing that software should be gatekept to the level of other engineering disciplines?
I do not like or want to use the term "gatekeeping" here, but yes, I think that software engineering should be held to a higher standard. You can't have it both ways.
> There are no devs that will go to prison if what they produce has, say, a major vulnerability. That alone disqualifies it from being engineering. There's no licensure, there's no liability
The only problem in your theory is that none of those things has anything to do with "engineering".
You're arguing that a surgeon who removes a burst appendix in a hygienic environment isn't "practicing medicine" if they aren't licensed to do that in the jurisdiction where it happens. You'd have to be insane to believe that.
Engineering means solving problems. A license is a license. They're unrelated concepts.
Ooof. This is a big topic - I understand where you're coming from, but it's a common sentiment & one I've recently come to disagree more & more with.
Firstly: class solidarity. The apparent death of (or at least notable decline in) class solidarity is popularly lumped upon software engineers because they're relatively highly paid, but it's equally as absent in newly created positions (mainly within the IT sector) at all salary levels. There's been a concerted effort to erode class awareness in the private sector for the past 40+ years & it's been effective across all sectors, mostly in newly created job categories without pre-existing union culture. It's in no way specific to software engineering as a role nor to high salary positions.
Secondly: ai & llms. Currently these technologies are monopolised by corporate entities, with models generally being far too inefficient to democratise, so it's obviously tempting to conflate their very existence with their owners, but if you're singling out ai usage as some kind of affordance to the capitalist class you're missing the woods for the trees. You need to separate ownership from existence/usage.
> It's in no way specific to software engineering as a role nor to high salary positions.
Yes, I agree. We are, however, on a site and in a thread that is dedicated to the role of software engineering, so I don't really care about the wider discussion at the moment.
My sole input here is that software engineering has not protected itself as a field, and it will now pay the price for that.
> My sole input here is that software engineering has not protected itself as a field, and it will now pay the price for that.
& my point in raising that this is not an issue that's unique to software engineering is to argue that the demons you're proposing software engineers protect themselves from are distractions from the root cause. You're proposing software engineers need to protect themselves from something that's specific to their field when the problem is holistic.
1 reply →
happens all the time. Some business jerk outsources an entire initiative, forces it through review, and we get dumped with externally written crap we gotta deal with. So what if claude wrote it, actually claude is better than money wasted on those outsourced piles of crap projects