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Comment by bshimmin | Hacker News Reader

While I don't much like software developers calling themselves engineers either, it was hard not to read this and think that about a week ago I was reading all about a dam that seemed poised to fail and thousands of people had to be evacuated; or about a miracle of engineering, a skyscraper in SF that appears to be sinking (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/us/san-francisco-millenni... or, oh, here's an entire Wikipedia page just for structural collapses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_structural_failures_an...

My point, if I have one, is that Ashley Madison getting hacked (specifically mentioned in the article) was a pretty embarrassing calamity, sure, but I don't think anyone died as a result of a lack of proper collaboration and regulation in software development.

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>I don't think anyone died as a result of a lack of proper collaboration and regulation in software development.

Come work in healthcare, you may change your mind.

In healthcare, a lack of domain expertise, rigor, collaboration, and regulation kills people every day. And inhibits our science. And is the root cause of billions a week in waste.

Yes, most web content and it's delivery we could do well, or be better off, without. But in many jobs, the software constrains or enables behaviors that have real consequences.

When I worked in healthcare, every piece of software that interacted with a human in a healthcare related situation was extensively regulated. There was an enormous amount of documentation, change control, effort to change things (for example, updating the firmware was considered a major change to the system and had to be documented in detail).

Are you talking about research, rather than healthcare?

Pointing out failures in engineering isn't a productive exercise.

The difference is that engineers have both professional ethical obligations that they can fall back on and accountability. It is possible that the guy who stamped the sinking skyscraper will lose his license, for example.

In technology, the lack of a real engineering culture is a profoundly negative thing in many ways. When your boss demands that you do something clearly unethical, you have no backdrop as a professional to say "I cannot do this". Engineers, attorneys and CPAs have that.

Except, you know, there's the law I could refer to.

Or like two months ago when the guy who hired me wanted me to ship software that was clearly going to explode in production and I told him that I'm not interested in having that kind of disaster on my conscience and that he would just have to deal with the fact that its going to take longer to ship.

Saying no is about having a spine, not about being able to hide behind something that you can hold against your employer. Maybe they're right. If you are incapable of making decisions in a professional fashion, you should not call yourself an engineer.

Ethics can be a tough thing, and it can take more than just a spine to refuse unethical work. Identifying something as being unethical in the first place can be a challenge for someone new to a discipline. Having a professional community that explicitly teaches and tests you about their Code of Ethics gives you a framework and support network to help you with those decisions. It's also kind of a cultural thing. Having transitioned from chemical engineering to artificial intelligence, I'm amazed at the different cultures regarding ethics. Not having an entity responsible for defining the code of ethics in my new discipline, and the lack of community around it, has made it much more difficult to discuss and challenge the ethical decisions we make. Most of the time, when I bring up ethical discussions, my classmates and professors respond with "that's not our responsibility". When I ask whose responsibility it is, the answer is always "someone else's".

This is simply not true for all tech companies. I've had instances where I said no due to asks being not in line with company policies and we changed course to tackle the problem another way. I work at Microsoft and there's severe rules against retaliation should your boss penalize you for something like this.

For every Microsoft, you have 50 pretty much any advertising network, random consulting firm or other company that doesn't give a shit.

Exactly, having the backing of a profession that expects and mandates you uphold its Code of Ethics is a very powerful thing. Refusing to do work you deem unethical is much easier when you have the support, expectation and legal obligation to do so.

There are a number of well known software bugs that killed people. For example the Therac-25 is mentioned in every software engineering course.

Engineers have a way of falling on their swords when they #$%^ up that (at least in my experience) tech bros don't...

http://www.theolympian.com/news/local/article42065382.html

A very real and sad example of problems with software.

http://www-users.math.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/patriot.html

What about failures in medical software, airplane safety software, or military software?

Most planes crash because of something else than software... Most casualties in the medical domain are not caused by software... to say nothing about war casualties.

It's not sand in the oil, it's the lack of a filter, that cause a crash. It's not human error, it's badly designed UI. It's not aging, it's improper material choice. It's not a manufacturing problem, it's a design problem with the manufacturing process.

Software is just yet another imperfect engineering domain.

It's too easy to point to software engineering as fundamentally flawed without looking at all the flaws in engineering(TM)...

To round out your point: some failures are the result of perfectly valid cost/risk trade-offs.

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