Hacker News Reader

Comment by rapsey | Hacker News Reader

IoT devices are generally built and programmed by electronic engineers. They have no knowledge about software security and neither do they care.

View on HN

While true in many cases, in my experience it's not only the engineers. Unless you have the senior managers on board as well, they'll just lean on the engineers to "ship now".

And those managers don't care either because their area is in electronics not software.

IoT is electronics people coming into the software world and building software like it's the 90s.

While EEs are part to blame, the other half is just graduated (or "bootcamp graduated" - let's put it this way) developers that know all the node.js shortcuts but don't know about the fundamentals of internet security.

Not sure we can blame bootcamps - I learned nothing about internet security in my software engineering college course.

But you probably knew that is was something to consider. And weren't told that you are basically a full fledged developer after a 3 month web dev course and after reading "cracking the coding interview". The Dunning–Kruger effect is heavily at work there.

I'm not the person you responded to, but not really. My college courses - admittedly as a Computer Science major, not Software Engineering - were laughably lacking any practical education. The closest we had was one group project, and we didn't even learn about things like version control.

Security? Forget it.

I've never gone to a bootcamp, but I'd wager that they at least mention security in their classes. College was the equivalent of the PHP documentation that had incredibly insecure examples that people "learned" from.

That’s wrong. An engineer has a couple managers above. Product, project, platform manager. You name it. Engineer is just another blue collar worker nowadays. No decision making power. I was not allowed to save company $40k, they told that numbers shouldn’t interest me. If management says, we need no encryption and authentifition, it’s totally ok. I just print their emails with this statement for later.

Engineering is absolutely not blue collar, but this has nothing to do with the issue you’re facing. If you found an opportunity to save $40k and they said you shouldn’t care about numbers, then either you have poor management or there’s more to the story that you didn’t share. At the very least competent management should have been able to explain why saving the $40k was the wrong trade off.

Yes, competent management. Didn’t experienced much companies having it. With competent management I could save my salary for couple years in this project alone. The client ist other branch of the same company. I could design a pcb with components for our needs, instead of that management wants to go with expensive 3rd party module having all bells and whistles on it.

Edit: pcb design is risky. But the system is very primitive having voltage regulator and single integrated circuit in it. I doubt this department with current performance would survive as independent company.

If you can save 40k and they don't care. Ask for a 40k raise and if they say they don't have the money ... well ... you know where to get it.

Managers get their cues from engineers. Electronics companies obviously mostly have electronics engineers and they run the engineering side.

> Product, project, platform manager

you'd be surprised to learn how many pieces of code were designed, written and shipped by one man army.

They are generally designed by electronic engineers and programmed by programmers. And most programmers don't care about security all that much.

> and programmed by programmers

Not in my experience. But it's obviously not the same everywhere.

Maybe in garage projects, but there it can as well be in the opposite way. Would be really surprised to see it mixed in a corporate setup or with even smaller design contractors.

As an electronics engineer with a decent grasp on software as well... that hurts ;(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com