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HNisCurated

Here is a question to people who proposed criminal charges for managers who let their platform get hacked-

Even Apple gets cracked. Do these developers need to do jail time?

Edit, I don't even agree with this. I'm asking the popular sentiment.

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Please don't post flamebait to HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I asked a serious question and got serious responses. Please let people ask questions.

The only developers that would be left after such a shift in liability would be the ones with law degrees.

And the ones with a proper engineering degree, instead of calling themselves engineers after a 6 months bootcamp.

Why should an engineering degree be any sort of requirement? The best programmers I can think of (Knuth, Ritchie, and Stallman) don't have them and I've met plenty of competent developers who didn't either.

They surely have a degree in some form of enginnering and are far beyond those that call themselves engineer without having put a foot into an university.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth#Education

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie#Personal_life_a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Harvard_Unive...

They all have degrees in STEM, but not in any "engineering" (i.e. ABET approved) program. It's also worth noting that having a university degree is not a requirement to be a licensed engineer in many places, including California.

STEM is part of engineering, that is what that E is about.

Being an "engineer" without a valid university degree in engineering was my whole point.

That's not how acronyms work. Engineering is the E in STEM, not the other way around. STEM also includes Science, Technology, and Math, none of which are Engineering.

They are on this side of pound.

The large majority of STEM university degrees have engineering in the title and are overseen by the Engineering Order as proper degrees.

I don't have an engineering degree, but rather a CS degree. Did I learn proper design and protocol for making secure software? I support requiring some sort of registration/testing/regulation of Professional (software) engineering, just like my mechanical engineering friends

Some schools have their CS program in the engineering department and have requirements which follow from that dependency. So whether you have an engineering degree depends on the school?

Otherwise I agree, there should be a standard for professional software engineering. There are efforts underway already in that direction.

I am absolutely confident that 100% of developers with an engineering degree and at least five years of experience have written at least one security vuln. Most have written hundreds.

And those lacking proper education have written even more, if we are now going to start counting.

Even if this is true, the thread here is discussing throwing engineers who write vulns in prison. We'd all be in jail in that world, degree or not.

I'm picking up a very defensive vibe about your own degree here. Are you worried about getting replaced?

Not all at, just fully disagree the misuse of engineering word, in some countries, by people that most of the time didn't set foot in college, or if they did, the degree had nothing to do with engineering.

Why should I be afraid? Over here Engineering is regulated and it surely isn't going to change during my lifetime.

Take a look at école 42 just next door to you [1].

It breaks all pre-conception of a certified french engineering school. You don't even need to have finished high school to apply! At most they'll be restricted out of governmental jobs, a drop in the bucket of EU jobs.

This is a very silicon-valley like way of thinking : Disrupting the incumbent who cannot adapt to new thoughts. Maybe you should be afraid, because change in on the way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42_(school)

In some countries, that's a rational, deliberate decision.

Do you think Apple is hiring those people to work on iMessage?

It doesn't matter what a single company does, the whole industry needs to improve in regards to quality of deliverables.

what about any kind of degree that prevents people from jumping to such logical chains : coding bootcamps -> low quality of deliverables industry wide -> iMessage bug!

If companies were hint hard on their pockets due to iMessage like bugs, they certainly would take care to hire and put into place the respective measures to prevent them from happening.

One of such measures, like in other professions, is ensuring a proper education and respective certification.

These iMessage bugs were implemented by properly educated and certified engineers. So what's the take home conclusion now?

So 100% of the team is composed by foreign workers? Given that US doesn't do certification of engineering degrees.

Can you please prove that to this audience.

Lets assume that is the case just to make you happy.

Then it is certainly a prof that the learnings weren't taken into consideration when setting up the quality certification chain of the iMesssages development process.

Relax, I don't know what "certification" means to you specifically. But what makes you think Apple doesn't already hire the best-in-class engineers they can get their hands on?

Anyway, we're pretty far off the initial claim you made : "it's those poor saps from coding bootcamps that are the reason this industry is doomed".

Yeah. That's the only way you get companies to slow down and do it right. The vast majority of those flaws are completely preventable, we are just not investing in quality as an industry.

It's an interesting sentiment for sure. But unlike other engineering disciplines, software flows freely and easily between borders. What about, say, importing software from countries like China, where in some cases developer best-practices are lax? Do we then need some sort of vetting process for the import of foreign software? That seems the logical conclusion of implementing something like this.

Well, if we want to make Software Engineers real, credentialed Engineers, then perhaps this is how...

Some of us actually are.

It just isn't a widespread thing.

Is this in the US? I wasn't aware that any jurisdictions were licensing software engineers at this point. I'd certainly be interested in hearing more!

Portugal.

While you aren't strictly required to be certified to work as Engineer. You are required as such by law in case you have legal responsibilities on the project, like having your name in contracts.

Additionally any university that wants to offer an engineering degree, must have the degree certified as compliant with the Order requirements for such a degree.

So even if you don't do the certification, at least there is some assurance regarding the quality of the teaching.

Some other European countries have similar approaches to this.

Thanks for sharing that. Definitely sounds like a step in the right direction. I've heard some talk in the US about improving the credentials for software engineering, but primarily at a professional organizational or educational level, not at the formal government-recognized Professional Engineer level, however.

And look at all the amazing billion dollar tech companies, open source projects, operating systems, programming languages & compilers that come from there compared to the US.

Ah yeah, I can see how much better the certification makes everything now. Thanks for that!

Those things are orthogonal.

Having 60 work hour weeks, 1 week vacation and tons of VC money to spend is not related with having a degree.

In fact many of those marvelous US things were created by expat teams, which got an engineer degree back home before trying their luck in US.

Yes, it is in the US!

You can get certified as a Professional Engineer (PE) by the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES). The general requirements are a degree from an accredited program, passing the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam, 4 years of supervision under a PE, and passing a PE exam.

Here's some information on the PE Electrical and Computer exam: https://ncees.org/engineering/pe/electrical-computer/

As far as I know there isn't much benefit to becoming a PE as a programmer unless you are working in an industry that requires it. I have heard that some programming jobs at power companies require a PE, but I have never come across any. The National Society of Professional Engineers has a job board, but none of the programming jobs currently on it require a PE: https://careers.nspe.org/jobs/discipline/computer-software-e...

I took the FE as a part of my undergraduate degree but I don't expect that I will ever become a PE.

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