Comment by thewebguyd
5 hours ago
> 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.