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Comment by scruple | Hacker News Reader

> One difference is that a license is required to practice civil engineering.

I've often wondered about this. Who exactly has to be licensed? Are there management layers in civil engineering firms where the license isn't required? I think my point is pretty easy to follow. I'd love for all of us to be licensed to practice software engineering, but I don't hold any hope that it would fix all of the other compounding problems that our industry has as it relates to product/project management and management-born issues.

For example, would being licensed stop executives at a triple-A video game company from prematurely announcing games / release dates, or accepting pre-orders for games that won't be finished on time, and forcing all of the people under then to scramble and crunch and do things that would generally be considered anti-thetical to whatever being licensed in software engineering could mean?

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One huge issue with introducing licensing in software engineering is the fact that there are a great many very competent self taught software engineers. This breaks the conventional model of how licensing works with its close coupling to university degree programs.

The reason you see so many autodidacts is that its one of the few engineering fields where tinkering is both cheap and safe. Civil engineers basically can't tinker beyond maybe building models or using physically realistic simulations, and neither of those is a substitute for really building things at scale. Anyone with a decent computer can tinker endlessly with software with little or no consequence to anyone else when it breaks.

The only other engineering field like this I can think of is electronics, where you also have a lot of autodidacts because components are cheap and unless you are messing with super high voltages it's pretty safe to play around.

There is always a huge pushback against licensing in this field because it would be (accurately I think) seen as a way for universities to erect a mandatory toll booth.

The second huge issue is that we don't have a good theory of good programming practice. There was an attempt to systematize things in the 90s "design patterns" era and all it got us was a ton of monstrous overengineering satirized by the many "hello world, enterprise edition" joke code bases on GitHub. More academic efforts around provable correctness have never managed to cross the practicality gap for widespread adoption.

Many security practitioners are self taught and the security certifications compensate for that.

https://www.isc2.org/Certifications/CISSP/experience-require...

There is a third issue to licensing that dates back to ancient "law of strongmen" without even lofty claimed principles like divine right, let alone anything worth folllwing of free will; introducing a law that cannot be enforced only breeds contempt for the law. It is hard, expensive, and rare to covertly build infastructure. It isn't the case for software. Just blindly aping it would be draconian and silly.

At best it could be a license for specific safety critical applications but that would be dependent upon the licensed ones actually doing a better job at being safer which is harder for the first two reasons you listed.

Hell certifications are infamous for generally not being that career useful.

> One huge issue with introducing licensing in software engineering is the fact that there are a great many very competent self taught software engineers. This breaks the conventional model of how licensing works with its close coupling to university degree programs.

Uncle Bob argues that this is why we need to start self-policing and create certification structures that take this into account.

If we don't, the next software-related disaster will force governments to set up regulatory structures the only way they know how -- tied to university degrees. They won't understand the value of a self-taught developer.

We do. We should be the ones to create structures in which such people can be officially recognised for their abilities.

There are checkpoints in civil engineering projects that can't be passed without a professional engineer affixing their official seal to a document. If you are a professional engineer and you are found to have done this improperly you will lose your license, which is way worse than being fired because you won't be able to get a job anywhere else either. And civil engineers are indoctrinated into their field's ethics culture with lots of reminders of how many people died when current practices were not followed.

If a firm is found to have inappropriately (for example, pressuring a professional engineer to affix their seal inappropriately) they will lose their certificate of authorization and then not be able to do any engineering work.

> And civil engineers are indoctrinated into their field's ethics culture with lots of reminders of how many people died when current practices were not followed.

E.g. the Iron Ring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring

> The Iron Ring is a ring worn by many Canadian-trained engineers, as a symbol and reminder of the obligations and ethics associated with their profession. The ring is presented to engineering graduates in a closed ceremony known as the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer. The concept of the ritual and its Iron Rings originated from H. E. T. Haultain in 1922, with assistance from Rudyard Kipling, who crafted the ritual at Haultain's request.

> The ring symbolizes the pride which engineers have in their profession, while simultaneously reminding them of their humility. The ring serves as a reminder to the engineer and others of the engineer's obligation to live by a high standard of professional conduct.

I didn't see it mentioned in the Wikipedia article, but i was under the impression that the first of these rings were made from the iron of a bridge that failed.

My uncle is a senior partner in a major civil engineering firm and my wife’s best friend is a civil engineer. Everybody who practices civil engineering in Texas must be licensed to be employable. Maybe you could intern without a license, but you wouldn’t be involved with any project related work.

You've just changed the word without actually defining anything. What constitutes practicing? What stops one licensed engineer approve a design nominally created by thousands of unlicensed lower engineers?

> You've just changed the word without actually defining anything. What constitutes practicing?

Work for compensation.

The licensed engineer puts their stamp on that work? If anything happens the licensed engineer is on the hook.

Ultimately accountability.

There's a reason we have hard standards for being a PE or an MD. If you just let anyone do it you risk many problems.

Most software simply isn't like this. The valley loves talking about disruption and all and how world changing everything they do is, but the fact of the matter is social media isn't killing anyone like a failed bridge would or a person who isn't qualified as a doctor. Most of the money made in the valley is off of advertising or data. Who cares if the product is shitty? people don't die. rich people make a little less money.

That said, social media and targeted advertising is used to cause far greater (and more subtle) damage, like polarising opinion and influencing elections. Not to mention common patterns of social media usage (which we have developed and incentivised) are proven to strongly correlate with lower quality of life. (I vaguely remember a causal link too, but I won't say that for sure without a reference.)

A bridge hosts what? 400 people at worst (i.e. when there äre passenger trains on it.) Social media easily hosts 400 thousand or million people.

The single bridge-collapsing event is very dramatic and visceral, but digital platforms allow us to cause damage and death by a thousand cuts.

You missed my point. Pay the licensed engineer enough money and he'll become an approver. He can do whatever quality checks he wants as long as he signs off on it. Then I can recoup savings by having tons of unlicensed engineers doing the actual work.

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