I'm retiring from the engineering profession | Hacker News Reader

I'm retiring from the engineering profession

strongtowns.org

266 pointsThatGeoGuy190 comments

Read his excellent book Confessions. Because he criticizes unethical/corrupt engineering practices his enemies say he is bringing ill repute upon the profession and violating the terms of his license.

Granted I only clicked through to three links, but I can’t find what this person actually stands for or what their opponents object to. It’s just conflict without content as far as I can find. Why should I care about this? There’s a cause but I don’t understand what it is.

The author's engineering license lapsed in 2018, in 2020 he realized it had lapsed, so he renewed it and paid a late fee.

He's being asked to pay a fine, take an ethics course, and admit to dishonesty--because during the period when the license was lapsed, he still put "professional engineer" after his name.

It sounds like this is happening because some people are mad at him, and not because this is a serious violation that a licensing board would ordinarily punish.

We are hearing only one side of things here.

I could just as easily read that as someone who no longer practices using their license to give weight to their activism, and then it turns out they didn't even bother to actually keep up that license that they were using to get people to listen to them.

If guess it probably mostly depends on if your think the lapsed license is a legitimate accident or a sign of indifference. Assuming the board is in fact usually forgiving on lapses as is suggested here.

It's because he is critical of the work of his peers. Forcing someone to admit to dishonesty is a petty abuse of power. The board is effectively compelling him to grovel.

"It's easy to find a stick to beat a dog"

"Show me the man, I'll show you the crime"

Well there is an "about" page, linked from the header in desktop or hidden in the "+" menu on mobile.

Their articles have shown up here a fair few times, which I assume is part of what makes it interesting.

They have a good YouTube channel but you’d have to watch a bit to get an idea. Basically they’re advocating for building towns and cities that aren’t car-centric. Talking about overhauling planning standards to stop single-dwelling only suburbs that are only accessible by car, proper transit planning, not just enlarging freeways and then finding induced demand makes them even slower over time, etc.

> They have a good YouTube channel but you’d have to watch a bit to get an idea.

Or you could just click on the blog header and read its “about” statement, which would only take a couple of minutes.

It appears they claim there was aggressive suppression of free speech, on important policy matters, by a professional licensing board?

Chuck Marohn is an ideas-guy that pivoted his career from engineer to paid speaker. It’s a lot of TED-talks kind of stuff that resonates with certain donors, and it includes a lot of “guys, you’re doing it wrong!” statements and trashing trade organizations. Those trade organizations have pushed the licensure board to strip Marohn’s license for years, and I think he’s finally had enough of the legal trouble.

Strong Towns criticizes U.S. street design and development practices. Mainly they argue that many of the design practices pushed in manuals and by the engineering profession are dangerous and lead to worse cities (especially because they give too much deference to cars). They'd want things like ending minimum parking requirements, redesigning intersections and roads to make them more safe for pedestrians and cyclists, bringing back older style main streets, etc.

Because Mr. Marohn criticizes standard road engineering practices he has evidently developed enemies within the engineering profession. Some of these enemies are retaliating by initiating lawsuits for calling himself an engineer during a period where he had inadvertantly let his license lapse.

From the article:

"Claims that the title “Professional Engineer” and the initials “PE” are a trade name, the very use of which constitutes commercial speech in any circumstance, is inconsistent with how I understand my vocation. I suspect most of my fellow licensees similarly consider themselves public servants, not commercial entities whose competitive privilege is protected by a state cartel."

While I understand his complaint here, I'm afraid his implicit factual claim is false: any profession that depends on the government to license its members is in fact a "commercial entity whose competitive privilege is protected by a state cartel". If Professional Engineers really want to be "public servants", the best way for them to do that, ironically, is to have their own private licensing body that applies its own independent, objective standards and cannot be used by governments as political tools.

You're missing the forest for a piece of bark on a tree. His point is that engineering licensing boards should be more than just a government-sponsored cartel for rubber stamping conforming license requests, and practitioners should do more than just validate that projects meet the required specifications according to accepted standards, but that the industry -- from individuals to institutions -- should also operate with an ethical and moral imperative to learn and improve and grow the discipline at the current edge of its domain of competence. If "accepted standards" are shown to be wrong then it's not good enough to continue using them, as if the legal indemnification provided by standing behind an "accepted standard" is the only thing that matters.

Doesn't that already happen though? A bridge fails due to water hanging from the cables making them asymmetric and coupling wind energy into bridge oscillation, and cables get redesigned with a spiral thingy to prevent that in the future. Asbestos turns out to cause cancer, and suddenly it's no longer an allowed building material. Or whatever.

TFA links to a 2014 post by Strong Towns [1] that describes exactly such a failure and espouses frustration at the lack of response. This post, among others, was cited as evidence for harassing the author over a short lapse of license (while it was not in active use), which was blown up into an uncharacteristic, disproportionate, and unwarranted demand to publicly sign documents admitting to dishonesty, misrepresentation, and fraud. The existence of such a document regardless of details would be enough to completely discredit and dismiss all of the author's speech. It's rank protectionism and speech silencing in the guise of following rules and procedures.

[1]: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/12/3/just-another-p...

...a drunk driver hits people crossing in sleet (ie, low visibility) and a crosswalk is so certain to have helped that whoever didn't put one there deserves to be sued.

I'm slightly curious to know how closely the actual reason for removing the half-assed crosswalk rather than turning it into a real one matches the clearly editorialized reason he's accusing them of having. I suppose there's no possible way it could have been something like "too many drivers won't respect it and it'll give pedestrians a false sense of safety" or such.

By arguing the validity of the article's points you implicitly admit the space to discuss it and thus we fall directly into free speech. The important debate here is not whether Strong Towns is or is not correct, the debate is whether people can use government bureaucracy and process as a stick to silence speech they dislike. None of the allegations made by the license board have anything to do with the validity of Strong Towns' claims, just that he signed his name with "PE" while being fully qualified as a PE but with a lapsed license.

I don't really agree with the perspective Strong Towns presents, but I'd agree that this is an egregious overstep.

Like what Oregon was doing to a guy several years back.

> Doesn't that already happen though? A bridge fails due to water hanging from the cables making them asymmetric and coupling wind energy into bridge oscillation, and cables get redesigned with a spiral thingy to prevent that in the future.

Do you think it happens automatically or every time? It happens when ethical people make it happen, partly through organizations like Strong Towns.

> His point is that engineering licensing boards should be more than just a government-sponsored cartel for rubber stamping conforming license requests

And I explicitly stated how that should be done in my comment. That is not "a piece of bark on the tree". It's the forest. As long as "professions" depend on governments to license them, the problem will continue.

He didn't abuse his lapsed license in a professional capacity and he paid the requisite late fee and accepted other reprimands, there's nothing left that needs protection here. They don't need a signed statement admitting dishonesty and fraud that can be bandied about in unrelated contexts to cancel his advocacy speech about how the engineering profession needs to make some changes.

> He didn't abuse his lapsed license in a professional capacity

Yes, I know that. And yet the state licensing board kept after him. In other words, the state licensing board is obviously not applying objective professional standards to his behavior. Why not? Because it's a government organization, i.e., it's political, not professional. So the only way to fix the problem he's having is to not have the licensing organization be a government organization.

Plenty of government organizations are not political; that's how most of the civil service works.

They are not political up until the moment an important enough issue comes up to make them political.

I agree that if the organization is applying rules unfairly or disproportionately then we need to fix it, but I don't see how privatizing it will do anything but push the problem around. Human organizations have a natural tendency towards politicization because humans are inherently political creatures, orgs should be designed to resist abuse regardless of where their roots are planted.

As anyone who has ever dealt with workplace politics knows, "political" acts in professional contexts are not limited to the government.

A private licensing board would be just as liable to do such nasty things.

That "because" is glossing over a massive leap in logic. "Not applying objective professional standards" is not just a government problem, as pretty much anyone with experience in a large-scale private organization can attest.

> In other words, the state licensing board is obviously not applying objective professional standards to his behavior. Why not? Because it's a government organization, i.e., it's political, not professional.

Please, you have this backwards. It is acting like a private professional guild, which gets to choose its own criteria for who gets to be in the club. Who gets to “define” what HTML is or who defines what is conduct unbecoming of an Elk.

As the strong towns guy is out, as government entity the licensing board is not permitted to do that: it has to follow the public criteria (which are set by statute and litigated by the courts) and, regardless of statute, follow constitutional constraints such as those of the first amendment.

I think it is unhelpful to approach every question with the assumption that every government action is inherently corrupt.

This is a conspicuously narrow view on what politics are.

A professional association or licensing board or whatever similar structure, regardless of whether or not it is embedded in government, is textbook political.

That's entirely separate from the issue of whether or not they exercise restraint and engage constructively when their credibility is challenged.

Why not both? Just because you have special legal status to have the government recognize you as authoritative on certain specific topics, doesn't have to mean you can't also identify as a public servant and do activities or advocacy you think will help the public.

> Why not both?

This article illustrates why not. The author is a professional engineer, but he can't depend on the body that licenses him--the government of Minnesota--to judge him by objective professional standards as he advocates for better engineering practices, because it's a government and therefore a fundamentally political organization, not a professional one.

Why is it because it's a government? Why do you think that simply moving the organization from the government to a private organization would somehow make it less political?

Do you think that politics can somehow only exist in government? I disagree, politics play significant part in any human endeavors, see for example office politics, corporate politics, etc.

Private organizations are patronized by market capital -- though more importantly, as individuals condemn it afoul, not patronized. The same isn't true for the state, of which there is only one, and operates as winner-take-all.

Not necessarily. They could have donations made to them for political or ideological reasons and stay in business this way. Plenty of companies have expressed political leanings as part of their marketing material in order to capture different customer segments more thoroughly.

Private professional organizations are never patronized by market capital. How would that work anyway? They're professional organizations, they don't make a product. They're organized as a non-profit of some sort.

The problem here is that this gentleman is speaking truth to power, and power doesn't like that very much. The professional organization being governmental, or having a government-granted monopoly, versus being a private organization, is basically irrelevant. The organization being part of the government usually grants additional public oversight, not less.

At least some of his issues were from other individual P.E.s filing complaints against him. That's the sort of thing that can happen in any organization, governmental or not.

My feelings are mixed. The licensing processing is pretty lenient, and NCEES testing just weeds out the bottom 1/3 of applicants. Keeping a license is basically a matter of paying your dues. Sure, people get disciplined by the board, but it’s almost always for forgetting their PDH credits, which are “listen to this vendor-sponsored webinar during lunch and you’ll get an hour”. Practicing outside one’s competence is very common, and almost nobody gets in trouble for that, unless there is legal trouble.

That said, licensing does create an artificial scarcity and a completely superfluous cottage industry of land-development hacks, typically one-man-show practices, that specialize in being a land owner or speculator’s pseudo-attorney for a permit application process. The construction plans for permit are basically conceptual, rife with flagrant errors, and may have little relevance to actual construction, since a contractor probably won’t use the plans anyway. In my region, maybe 30-60% of the market is like this, with the exceptions being larger commercial projects, like apartments or medical offices. A parking-lot extension for a quadplex, though? That’s going to be a PE who will perjure himself all day to a Planning Commission for $500. They’re just a licensed as the engineer scrutinizing seismic forces on bridge piles.

So is the free market the answer? I don’t know. The land owners are the ones choosing the hucksters. They’re also usually fast-dealers that aren’t concerned with product quality once it’s sold. I don’t think “develop as thou wilt” is a good policy because that used to be how it was done, and it killed enough people to create a demand for government intervention.

The problem is, like software, nobody has any idea how to measure “goodness” of civil engineering, and laymen have no idea of the quality of product they’re getting unless it fails catastrophically.

I just accept that it’s not perfect, the hacks aren’t going anywhere, and I try not to do shitty work.

I just "say" I'm an engineer like all the coders here. I don't hold a certification nor do I have an engineering degree. But I sure enjoy saying I'm an engineer. Like many of you fellow coders I'm getting close to claiming I'm a doctor too. Just call me Dr. Code. I have a license to precribe additional billable hours.

I'm a data plumber -- bits go through pipes and into buckets.

I'm a garbage collector, at least when coding in C.

Work gave us all tshirts that say “company name - Engineering”. I do enjoy walking around with it and people assuming I do something more interesting than working on ad tech.

>I just "say" I'm an engineer like all the coders here.

I work as a coder and actually have a bachelor's degree in information and communication technologies, so I've never really had any qualms about calling myself a software engineer.

You should, you DO NOT have an engineering degree....

But I do. My degree is Bachelor of Engineering (B.Eng). I'm even a member of the Union of Professional Engineers.

Seems reasonable. Physicians, without PhDs, usurped doctor from academics back in the day in an attempt to bring legitimacy to their profession, so why not coders as well?

Yep, doctor just means teacher. A physician should be called medicus if they want a fancy Latin title.

That's blanket illegal here in Quebec. You can't call yourself an engineer of any kind unless you're licensed by a professional board. I'm a software developer.

For those new to Strong Towns, I feel this article is most representative of what they’re about: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme

I'm skeptical that things are as bad as this article states.

The idea is that we just don't have enough productivity to sustain slightly longer roads, and live in the same houses we used to have on farms in 1920s is insulting to reader's intelligence.

This is just another piece of luddite alarmism.

Always Remember: the situation is SO DIRE, we had to exempt private jets from the fuel tax. Even billionaires simply can't afford to pay gas taxes, this is how bad things are /s: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-09/private-j...

Meanwhile the city of Austin debt service is 5% of its budget, and Austin's debt per capita is $1,287.

Some Ponzi.

Sure, we can just keep on increasing taxes until all the top earners leave for cheaper areas.

I prefer low taxes.

What's there to lose by building towns at a human scale? Personally, I can live without Fauxrari speeding past my door at 2 am.

Tax Flight Is a Myth: Higher State Taxes Bring More Revenue, Not More Migration:

https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/tax-fligh...

That’s a high quality study!

“It found that while the net out-migration rate of this income group accelerated after the tax increase went into effect, so did the net out-migration rate of filers with incomes between $200,000 and $500,000, and by virtually the same amount.”

That’s their argument high taxes don’t drive people elsewhere?

Luckily Texas is 32nd in tax burden, and has zero state income tax.

Then again, Texans may be in deep shit if the weather turns too cold or too hot and the power grid conked yet again.

Believe it or not, but a well maintained infrastructure has a lot to do with adequate taxation and regulation.

I just bought a generator with some of the tens of thousands I’m saving by not paying CA tax anymore

Indeed, unlike say, California whose high taxes have helped create a robust electrical infrastructure which hasn’t randomly started fires destroying entire towns (and killing dozens) and doesn’t have rolling blackouts each summer.

Is that what you mean?

ERCOT’s CEO was fired over the incident im sure you are referring to. fired within weeks.

Who’s getting fired over California’s blackouts? Let me guess, it’s all just climate change?

Texas has other even more terrifying fragilities that I'm not going to get specific on, because they're that scary and I don't want to give crazy people ideas.

Texas property taxes are insanely high, I would would consider moving to be closer to family, but I am pretty averse to the annual taxes at the properties that would appeal to me there (10k - 20k annual taxes).

No it's not. I'm currently contemplating leaving my country of residence because absurd tax rates. I'm a productive member of society and high earner but I'm starting to loose faith in my institutions. If you keep on taxing, and fail your responsibilities, people get fed up and leave, that's what they do. Only the people that don't have the means to leave stay creating a particular nasty downward spiral of people without jobs and home ownership dependent on government subsidies.

> No it's not. I'm currently contemplating leaving my country

Cool, your N=1 anecdote completely invalidates all the statistical research in that area.

Since the article is about state taxes, and the OP is talking about national taxes, I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive.

N=1 isn't an argument either. I'm simply saying what a lot of people in my situation also thinks. It's just sensible that you don't stay because you like paying taxes. You stay where you are because of family and friends. To say that it doesn't influence people decision is deceiving.

> all the statistical research in that area.

Calling BS on that right there

> If you keep on taxing, and fail your responsibilities, people get fed up and leave,

Well sure. But that's probably true of "fail your responsibilities" regardless of tax rate. Nobody wants to live in a state without a well-functioning government.

Where is your country of residence? What is your effective tax rate? (Please don't tell me about your top marginal rate -- that is nonsense unless you have a enormous taxable income.) What do you think is the "correct" tax rate for your income level?

Sweden, the way I think we should look at it is the discrepancy between what my employer is paying me and what I receive in my bank account.

That's 51.8% of what I make. That is the government is taking just slightly more than half of everything I earn.

In order to answer what I think is reasonable to pay in tax, we need to look at what the Swedish government spends it's money on. Core infrastructure, health care, school, police etc. This is about 30% of the current government spending. That is frightening to me. I'd be happy to pay less in tax, frankly I want to pay as little as possible but Sweden has this huge government apparatus and it's growing by the day with all kinds of more or less non-essential government arms. I could go into details but I won't right now. I just don't want to finance a lot of this with my money.

It won't be possible any time soon but I'd love to see my tax rate cut in half and given the spending of our governments it should be possible but only if we make it a priority.

Are you a Swedish national or a high income foreigner? If #2, I strongly encourage you to stop complaining and leave soon. Sweden is a highly advanced democracy. This tax rate has been confirmed by numerous, fairly elected governments. The result of this policy is very low income equality and very strong social safety net.

I can assure you that an effective tax rate of 25% would result in much higher income inequality, and much weaker social safety net. Is this the society that you want?

It's sounds like you'd be interested to live in my country (born and raised here, I'm almost 40 now and have two kids, happily married etc) but I don't think you know all too much about Sweden. And if you really want to know, ask away, I will answer as truthfully as I can.

The tax rate hasn't always been this high. It's basically the result of government overreach over the past 100 years. I don't think you need to take more than 25% to provide essential services but I also expect people to pay more for the services that they use. I want people to allocate capital more so that the government.

Right now, Sweden has a serious immigration problem. 2 million new people over that past 20 years, a lot of them from radically different cultures. Our social welfare is being used to support these people and they aren't able to contribute back. This is a net drain on our economy and I'm not super happy about that. The studies we have show that these people don't integrate and don't generate tax revenue. And I'm not paying these taxes for their benefit, I'm paying these taxes to build a better future for my kids.

For the longest time, the lie that was being told was that it be a huge asset and opportunity for Sweden and it could have turned out this way, Sweden has had successful immigration in the past but it didn't turn out this way this time.

You talk about progressive taxation and income inequality but people forget that you need a healthy economy as well. You can't just tax everybody and expect equality.

Despite everything you think you may know about Sweden, we have the most gun violence and the most rape in Europe. The Swedish police can't be bothered with solving all the rape because of all the killings.

We have an energy crisis because environmentalists wants to shut down our nuclear reactors (50% of our energy production) and replace it with wind whit cannot work short term or during winter.

I will stop here. At some point Sweden did deserve it's reputation but this country is living on old merits. There's so much crap going on right now that I will take my chances. At least in a free and open society I'd be able to make a bigger impact myself.

Zero trolling: Did you ever consider relocation? Nothing radical: How about Norway, Denmark, or Finland? I've heard there is lots of language overlap with Norway and Denmark. And Finland has lots of respect for Swedish speakers given their special minority status (Hello Linus Torvalds!). Maybe the taxes might not be a /lot/ lower, but the social issues might be /different/. Another good point about those three nations: They are all close to home, if you need/want to visit relatives often (in a low carbon manner!).

If you want something radical, I would recommend:

(1) Australia -- very rich (they avoided the 2008 global financial crisis), much less fair than Sweden (but not stupidly so like US/HK/SG), and crazy high quality of life.

(2) New Zealand -- still rich, more fair than AUS, and insanely good nature / food.

Yes, we're spending the summer in Denmark. If we like what we see this is the best option. It all hinges on how this year's election goes. I don't know why I believe we can change but I hope we bring about something new and start fixing problems.

Taxes in the Scandinavian countries are similar but it wouldn't be as frustrating to pay them if everything else was working as intended.

My situation is foobar and I rather go to some place where you as an individual have more freedom and responsibilities. New Zealand sounds nice and warm though.

>I prefer low taxes.

Texas is 32rd in terms of tax burden, you will prefer it.

>Personally, I can live without Fauxrari speeding past my door at 2 am.

That’s an enforcement problem. If you think this doesn’t happen in dense cities, with way more sports carts and way more bars, idk what to tell you.

I’ve literally moved to suburbia to escape the city noise. In my case it was fire engines passing by literally every 10 minutes. That’s normal in a dense “human-scale” city centre, but very rare in the suburbs.

> moved to suburbia to escape the city noise

City noise is almost all from automobiles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8

Yes and California where I am just announced a 90 billion dollar tax surplus and I see road and bridges getting fixed all the time. Maybe the rest of the country is falling apart. I don't really know.

- California had the tax surplus, not the towns.

- All ponzis look good, until growth stops and the whole thing collapses.

- The towns are being bailed out by the state.

- The fact that you are seeing roads and bridges getting fixed does not mean that poorer cities are. And Strong Towns also shows that the suburbs (even if richer) get subsidized by the city centers.

Austin is a highly productive dense city, not a low density suburb.

Austin may be productive but dense it is not! The city itself is only 1/4 as dense as say Chicago, nevermind if you include the suburbs...

Towns like Austin are precisely at issue. They grow by low density sprawl and large roads.

There's no way that characterizes Austin. It's a sprawly city. Anyone who even tries to go car free there will be disappointed.

Of course it's a typical growing infestation of mostly single-family-homes, but at least it has some urban core as opposed to the suburbs around it. And when Austin can't grow anymore those suburb-only municipalities will, and the prediction is that their finances will continue to worsen as upkeep costs start to dominate.

>at least it has some urban core

why do they need to exist?

they are even harder to maintain than suburbs, have you not noticed the meter thick layer of dirt in the NYC subway?

that's where the sausage is made

NYC public transportation has all the usual problems, but it moves a lot of people who otherwise would not be able to move. (this is basically why it's so "full of crazy people, but it's not a cause it's an effect of the efficiency of NYC)

> The idea is that we just don't have enough productivity to sustain slightly longer roads, and live in the same houses we used to have on farms in 1920s is insulting to reader's intelligence.

Plenty of academic research/literature on this, as well as books:

> Chuck is not the first to point out the financial inefficiencies associated with sprawl. Robert Burchell of Rutgers[1] has led several important studies showing the substantially increased municipal costs associated with sprawl development; my then-colleague Matt Raimi devoted a well-researched chapter to it in our 1999 book Once There Were Greenfields.[2] At NRDC, we undertook a small empirical study[3] in Cleveland and Chicago that confirmed the additional operating and maintenance costs associated with suburban wastewater infrastructure when compared with that in the cities.

* https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...

Strong Towns is only reporting what the literature is saying. You're free to be skeptical, but that's what they've concluded from the empirical evidence. The claim is falsifiable if you want to get into testing it.

Measure the cost of services per acre/hectare of low-density and of high-density, then measure the revenues. You'll see which is net positive and which is net negative:

> Urban3 is a consulting company that helps cities better understand the economic impact of development. They have worked with many American cities to better understand and visualize the costs of development, and uncover which properties are productive, and which are not. Some municipalities have been willing to share that information, and it has provided a fascinating glimpse into the financial problems caused by sprawling car-centric suburban development.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

Lafayette, LA case study from the video:

* https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/lafayette-la/

* https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...

This is an accounting and ROI issue. If you don't want to believe the numbers… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

>Measure the cost of services per acre/hectare of low-density and of high-density, then measure the revenues. You'll see which is net positive and which is net negative

I have no interest in living in shoeboxes.

> This is an accounting and ROI issue.

Nope. Some just think quality of life isn’t about accounting and ROI. Do enjoy your shoebox though.

Don’t be insulting and dismissive here. It’s against our community guidelines.

If you aren’t willing to look at the data, and are admitting you’re closed off to even considering the idea (“I have no interest”), how do you know your head isn’t fully in the sand, or that you’re not part of the problem?

> I have no interest in living in shoeboxes.

No need. See the concept of "streetcar suburbs" and how things used to be built pre-WW2:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+...

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/125+Hampton+Ave,+Toronto,+...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0

High(er) density does not mean Manhattan and Hong Kong levels of density. 50-100 people per hectare (Hamburg, Paris, Stockholm, London, Brussels) is not crazy high:

* https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter4/environment...

A video of what's available via a fifteen minute bicycle ride from Amsterdam:

* https://twitter.com/notjustbikes/status/1528394830086275075

Fifteen minutes pedalling in one direction is downtown, fifteen minutes in the other is farm land.

> Nope. Some just think quality of life isn’t about accounting and ROI. Do enjoy your shoebox though.

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/20+Sparkhall+Ave,+Toronto,...

IMHO you have a myopic view of what "urban" means.

Further, what will your quality of life be like if your municipality/county goes bankrupt:

* https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...

* https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=607402...

Or if taxes need to be raised over and over to keep things in a state of good repair and other services suffer. A growing portion of your income could end up going to taxes with less left over to discretionary spending because the place you're living in made bad financial decisions.

> Some just think quality of life isn’t about accounting and ROI

By disregarding the ROI, the implication is that other people need to live in the "shoeboxes" generating a surplus in order to fund your life choices.

If you want to avoid being a freeloader feel free to calculate the long-term cost of your suburban lifestyle and donate it to your municipality, or move to a rural area on well-water, septic, solar, and dirt roads.

Isn't Austin a city that is growing, continually attracting people? If so, it is not a valid example against their claim.

If you allow some pedantry:

The claim is that _cities that don't keep growing_ go broke: a->b

Showing ~b (Austin didn't go broke) only allows you to deduct ~a (Austin is growing) by modus tollens

Strongtowns is literal misinformation. The story about infrastructure costs killing municipalities is entirely false, and can be seen as such with only bare minimum of research. Infrastructure costs are typically around 10% of the budget of municipalities, and almost universally are under 20%. Look up your own city or town, and report back if you find otherwise.

all numbers rounded. I live in a city near Boston.

total budget: 300MM

school budget: 100MM

attributable to maintenance/keeping things running, including debt service: 92MM

fire and police: about 20MM each.

Interesting, which city is that?

Also add: - debt service related to infrastructure - higher transportation related costs, eg for school buses, fire fighting, parking related building costs But I agree Strongtown arguments tend to ignore other big cost categories.

> Infrastructure costs are typically around 10% of the budget of municipalities, and almost universally are under 20%.

Today's infrastructure/capital spending is tomorrow's operating spending:

* https://www.dearwinnipeg.com/2020/02/24/accounting-101-for-c...

* https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/11/8/holy-leaping-d...

If you don't believe this talk your local CPA.

It shouldn’t then be hard to point out to an old suburb, for which tomorrow already came. Where are they?

See another comment of mine:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31548507

See also case studies on the net revenue and 'municipal ROI' of low- versus high-density development:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31549334

Yes, when the political organization that would look bad if it bankrupted itself chooses how to do their accounting, they choose methods that make it look like they aren't bankrupt.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/12/7/the-lies-we-ac...

> It may be easiest to think in terms of personal finance. Imagine you purchase a car for $20,000 in 2015, but under a special promotion no payments are due on your bill until 2018. In what year did you incur the $20,000 bill? Most people would say 2015, the year you acquired the car. That’s the answer mandated under accrual accounting, a method of financial reporting required of all public companies by the Financial Accounting Standards Board. But many state and city legislatures disagree. They operate with the conviction that a bill is not incurred until the money leaves your bank account to pay it. So if you choose not to pay the bill for your car until 2018, for accounting purposes the bill will only appear that year.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/8/19/is-a-street-an...

> Current accounting practices do not bear any relation to the future cash flow or the actual financial health of the city. When cities take on obligations, they should be properly accounted for as liabilities, not assets. When the city uses debt to build new infrastructure, it is taking on the double liability of both the current debts payments and the future maintenance obligation. The tax base associated with these obligations needs to also be accounted for as a cash asset (think of it like an annuity) discounted over the useful life of the infrastructure. Then we would have an accurate account of the obligations (liabilities) of the community and how that compared to the tax base (assets) that needed to support them. In short, a true account.

There are plenty of suburban towns exhibiting exactly the same allegedly fiscally disastrous pattern of development, that are 50+ years old, and so the infrastructure debt should already catch up to them. Where are they?

Strongtowns tells very plausibly sounding stories, but is short of actual examples. Where are all the places getting bankrupt by infrastructure costs? Or is it always “half a century from now, the costs will totally catch up with you”?

1) We've more than doubled our population in the past 70 years which has allowed us to fund our current developments. This trend has slowed considerably and is likely to slow even more.

2) Massive federal government investment in specifically this type of development.

3) state bailouts of failing municipal infrastructure.

4) we are already seeing it happen in the form of chronic under-maintenance:

https://www.csis.org/analysis/united-states-broken-infrastru...

> In Wisconsin, farmers are struggling to safely use modern equipment on roads that were built over 50 years ago. In Arizona, a century-old bridge partially collapsed last summer after a train derailed. In Florida, old pipes are leaking millions of gallons of sewage.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/state-us-infrastructure

> Civil engineers raise safety concerns as well, warning that many bridges are structurally deficient and that antiquated drinking water and wastewater systems pose risks to public health

https://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-wastewater-treatment-fac...

> Although the lifetime of a sewer system (50 years) is longer than that of treatment equipment (15 to 20 years), renovation needs of a sewer system can be more costly. An EPA analysis estimated that if 600,000 miles of existing sewer systems were not renovated, the amount of deteriorated pipe would increase to 44% of the total network by 2020.

> Infrastructure costs are typically around 10% of the budget of municipalities, and almost universally are under 20%. Look up your own city or town, and report back if you find otherwise.

Give the crater sized potholes I used to see when I lived there , I’d believe even less for cities in SCl.

It seems overbroad in that some cities are doing fine, while in other, less trendy places, there actually are dying towns that these arguments could very well apply to.

The article says "most cities". The majority of municipalities in the US and elsewhere are those less trendy places. It’s a case of availability bias to think of NY or LA or Seattle or Austin as representative of "most cities". The "towns" in Strong Towns gives an idea of the size range of the municipalities they are talking about.

Ponzi schemes run fine as long as the growth continues. The challenge is running at steady-state, or even weathering declines. That’s when you see if full-cycle costs reconcile.

To quote Warren Buffet -- "Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked." That's one of the main points of Strong Towns; a focus on resiliency. Down turns in the economy, be it one oversized local sector (a local coal mine maybe) or all sectors (e.g. GFC), can be a trigger for a collapse; especially for a community that has focused all it's efficiency on that (those) sectors. If there's nothing left in the tank when the bad times come you only have one option left, collapse (and quite often a cascading collapse). Here's a term I just came up with; Sociological margin call.

That's a nice vivid metaphor for financial types. Although margin calls usually trigger liquidation, while Tainter's model of catabolic collapse starts more like an orderly wind-down. Or maybe a private vulture buyout. The real liquidation happens later.

The Strong Towns thesis is that there are a lot of ways for things to "look" fine when things are not actually fine.

As an example, municipalities often count physical infrastructure like streets and water pipes as an asset on their books[1], even though it is illiquid and incurs large long-term liabilities.

[1]https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/8/19/is-a-street-an...

As ex-urban planner in Europe and having lived in Houston, academic and professional knowledge of this wrong development in the US is widely known. He is just citing popular knowledge of the failed "American dream", suburban development for cars, not families.

Most of Europe has held a strong opposition to this development, and did fine.

Strong Towns has plenty of case studies of different places, to varying degrees, losing quite a bit of money on maintenance:

- Spokane: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/10/24/dispatches-fr...

- Kanas City: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/5/kansas-citys-fa...

- Cobb County: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/3/cobb-county-add...

- Collin County: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/9/27/a-texas-sized-...

- Baxter: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/18/the-classic-ca...

And then add to that the costs of climate change for car-centric development. And health effect costs of car-centric development.

That some cities get in trouble for any number of reasons isn't news and has been true throughout history, but to call America a Ponzi scheme is essentially meaningless. You might as well call civilization itself a Ponzi scheme that requires new members when they turn 18 to participate while old members at 65 cash out.

Outlining why civilization was a mistake is interesting, but not sure what good can come out of it: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

> but to call America a Ponzi scheme is essentially meaningless

Calling one specific economically advanced civilization a ponzi scheme because it has radically different and unsustainable development policy is far from meaningless given there are obvious models outside of the US that we could transition to.

> You might as well call civilization itself a Ponzi scheme that requires new members when they turn 18 to participate while old members at 65 cash out.

You might as well call all investments a ponzi scheme if our only requirement is that some people are buying in while others are exiting. The interesting aspect of an investment (or civilization/development policy) is how sustainable it is and how transparent it is about its sustainability.

> Outlining why civilization was a mistake is interesting, but not sure what good can come out of it

Strong Towns doesn't advocate that civilization was a mistake, and the good that can come of their work is not continuing to double down on unsustainable development practices.

> That some cities get in trouble for any number of reasons […]

Yes, but when you are told of specific reasons why cities can get into financial trouble it can allow you to avoid them.

Plenty of academic research/literature on this, as well as book:

* https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...

I read the article, and still don't see what is being proposed.

> we need to intentionally return to our traditional pattern of development, one based on creating neighborhoods of value, scaled to actual people. When we do this, we will inevitably rediscover our traditional values of prudence and thrift as well as the value of community and place.

So, less suburbs and more what?

Walkable cities and walkable small towns.

What does a walkable small town mean? I can walk to a pub, maybe some other food place, and a small market? The town I live in, like many around New England, has a cute little town center where the library and town hall are but there's not a lot else there. I'm certainly not living there without a car even if I were in the center.

I've spent some time doing walking tours in England and it doesn't seem much different.

Strongtowns isn’t totally anti car; it sounds like your small New England town is in the line of things they consider desirable.

My small Midwestern childhood suburb would have me drive at least 15 minutes to get to the nearest business, which was a big box supermarket with a parking lot that would take 10 minutes to walk across, plus crossing a highway sized median in order to get to the next business over. Meaning totally unwalkable, which is how most of the USA is - no town center with anything worth going to, meaning no community worth being a part of, and really high infrastructure costs for a very unproductive area.

> it sounds like your small New England town is in the line of things they consider desirable.

I don't know. It's mostly old farming towns around where I live. They don't generally have a lot of retail businesses--although the bigger ones may have some on the main street going through town. They're pleasant towns but you're mostly not walking to get places. To grocery shop I'm driving 15 minutes or to the nearest small city next door.

My town is the oldest one in the neighborhood (1600s) and my house is a couple hundred years old. But it was mostly farms so everything is pretty spread out.

The place you’re describing sounds like it’s less far-gone than much of the US. Lots of places on the East coast are like that because they predate cars by quite a lot, though many have also sprawled a lot later on.

A few things I would expect from a walkable small town:

- You’re able to easily walk to a grocery store

- Kids are able to easily and safely walk or bike to school

- Kids are able to easily and safely walk or bike to their friends’ houses

Most of the US, from what I’ve seen, doesn’t meet those standards.

In the semi-rural towns right around me, you mostly can't do those things. There are usually nice small town centers but not a lot of houses in the immediate center (which is also near the elementary school; the regional high school is the next town over). There's also very little in the way of businesses. And most of the town is pretty spread out along various country lanes. It's very pleasant but it isn't really walkable.

> So, less suburbs and more what? Sprawling, automobile-centric development enforced by exclusionary zoning has been the prevailing land-use model in the US and Canada for so long (starting soon after the close of WWII) that few people alive today know anything different.

Streetcar suburbs (even with the streetcars now long gone) are a model of development that Strong Towns endorses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/27/in-praise-of-s...

You may also appreciate: https://devonzuegel.com/post/we-should-be-building-cities-fo...

Hi HN,

I’m the board chair at Strong Towns[1]. I normally lay low on these topics but I'm seeing some incorrect info among the top comments, so I wanted to respond to a few things.

- - - - -

1. What is this all about?

Chuck is a licensed PE in Minnesota, and has maintained his license for years even though he was working in advocacy, not practicing engineering.

There's busy work to keep a license active. Chuck accidentally missed filing a renewal form and paying a fee in 2018, but continued all other requirements, such as taking required CE classes.

This is actually so common that there's a simple procedure for late filing with the state. Chuck filed and paid his late fees, and the state renewed his license with no comment.

About six weeks _after_ renewing his license, the state filed a complaint against Chuck accusing him of committing fraud because his bio on our website said he was a "professional engineer" during a window of time when his renewal was late.

There's no precedent for this. There are many PE's actually practicing engineering and signing documents with overdue renewal forms every year. They file late and get renewed with no issue.

During negotiations with the state, their comments made it clear the licensing board is seeking to use their power to discredit and silence Chuck's advocacy, hence the ongoing lawsuit to defend Chuck's right to free speech.

(Longer version here: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/5/23/lawsuit)

The linked article explains why Chuck is now choosing to move his license to "retired" status in 2022 rather than renew it again.

- - - - -

2. What is Strong Towns all about?

I've seen several comments here suggesting we're some kind of anti-car environmental thing, which is not correct.

Strong Towns is principally focused on municipal fiscal and economic health. We work with cities and towns that are struggling to keep the lights on and provide basic, functional services, and try to help them (a) understand how they got into the mess they're in, and (b) get out of it.

This connects with cars because the status quo in the US is as follows: typically the federal and state governments offer lots of funding for new roadways and roadway expansion for economic development purposes, but don't cover maintenance.

Many cities have much more infrastructure to maintain than their tax base can support, and also weak growth, so expansion is a bad idea. Nevertheless, cities usually seek and receive expansion road expansions because, culturally, we expect building more roads to make us more wealthy, and don't really question whether we're over-building or whether new / expanded roads will pay off.

Thus we advocate ending highway expansion (in most cases), and advocate better utilizing our existing infrastructure.

We are pro-walkability because walkable places are infrastructure efficient, therefore cost-effective and wealth-creating, which correlates with the outcomes we care about.

We also care a lot about transparency in municipal accounting, safe streets, housing, and removing unnecessary regulation (in particular parking mandates and certain kinds of zoning).

- - - - -

It's Sunday and I'm headed out with my family, but I'll check in on this a bit and try to answer questions if you all have any.

[1]: https://www.strongtowns.org/board

UK around 9:24 BST the link (and the strongtowns.org domain) is giving a certificate error. I've tried several different Internet connections (I'm on the mobile network and there can be issues sometimes) including links from my shell account on a shared server.

One device says "No OCSP Response" and the mobile broadband connection thinks the site contains adult content. Links just says 'ssl error'. So I archived the page so as to be able to read it...

https://archive.ph/hAKsX

Back on topic: I've heard of 'code of conduct' type cases being used in the days of the General Teaching Council in HR type disputes, not routine but apparently local union professionals had a case load. The GTC was abolished in 2010, and the teaching unions had a role in that.

I suppose he must call himself "Pirate Engineer" now.

Good for Charles Marohn!

You will see who is on your side when things fall apart. Suburbans sprawl has weakened towns, as has the Richard Florida mindset of attracting specific people to create an unsustainable economy.

Outside of Ontario Canada, I'm glad "software engineer" is not a regulated title. Imagine having a contrarian opinion on design patterns and then getting your livelihood threatened.

It's not just Ontario. It's pretty much all of Canada. Everyone should be careful about this.

Quebec's equivalent of PEO (Professional Engineers Ontario) is the OIQ (Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec). People in Ontario and Quebec have gotten nasty letters threatening legal action even for saying they're software engineers on Linkedin. Microsoft fought the law in Quebec and lost.

Alberta, BC, and even New Brunswick have similar laws. Other provinces might too.

>People in Ontario and Quebec have gotten nasty letters threatening legal action even for saying they're software engineers on Linkedin.

Seriously? Are the engineering licensing organizations really scouring linkedin for people calling themselves "engineers, and sending threatening letters to anyone who's not on their list?

Yes.

Yes. When I worked in Quebec (around 2017) the company got a reminder from OIQ that employees should not call themselves Engineers on LinkedIn unless they had a P.Eng.

The Engineer title is taken seriously in Canada, similar to how you can’t claim to be a medical doctor unless you actually are one.

Governments are like Religions. Every one of them arrogantly thinks their way is the superior way to do things (Across all sides of the political spectrum), despite the existence of contradictory governments with perfectly functioning, and sometimes better functioning societies.

For some reason it seems like the Internet pisses governments off of all stripes, since a Global, free, meritocracy where everyone can compete on an equal playing field is like giving them the finger. And while governments can keep a tight leash on their own citizens with rules and regulations, they can’t make the rest of the world do whatever crazy nonsense they feel like. In this example, Canada will just be left behind in the 21st Century economy.

> a Global, free, meritocracy where everyone can compete on an equal playing field

I don't see the Internet this way at all. While the above was a dream of Internet pioneers, now it's mostly fraud, mis- and disinformation campaigns, and parties using their power to dominate the marketplace.

> Every one of them arrogantly thinks their way is the superior way to do things (Across all sides of the political spectrum), despite the existence of contradictory governments with perfectly functioning, and sometimes better functioning societies.

That's ironcially similar to the parent comment, and a good example of what is on the Internet. Instead of facts, serious questions and analysis, it relies on trying to create a tide of emotion.

The job title is just “developer” or “programmer” rather than “engineer”. Not a big deal.

> meritocracy

You may wish to examine this concept more closely before thinking it is a completely good idea. Specifically see the book The meritocracy trap by Markovits:

* https://www.themeritocracytrap.com

* https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/meritoc...

* https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/24/20919030/...

Quebec also, as well as Texas for a couple of years.

"Developer with an engineering degree" is a reasonable substitute for regimes.

I'm of the opposite opinion. The industry is awash in newbies with senior titles being put on software projects where they are directly responsible for safety, privacy, health care, etc. Right now when software kills people, they chock it up to a system or hardware failure. In the next decade we will hear more about software bugs killing people, outing them, bankrupting them, overturning governments, hobbling armies, and then we'll have to reckon with why regulated titles exist.

No one can agree on what should actually be part of the regulation though. It would end up becoming a box checking exercise like security is where complying with requirements and actually being secure are unrelated.

Can you imagine if governments regulated something like if your code touches important data, it must either be written in a verified safe language like Rust? How would people feel about that?

Regular engineering is a lot easier to regulate because there are a lot of agreeable rules like “fire escape stairs need to be x cm wide with a step depth of z cm. And there is no situational context that needs to be taken in to account.

While all programming best practices are vague helpers that should be discarded as soon as they aren’t helping.

> Can you imagine if governments regulated something like if your code touches important data, it must either be written in a verified safe language like Rust? How would people feel about that?

Considering the history of memory-not-safe bugs and exploits and the efforts to rewrite critical things in rust due to memory safety I imagine this could be a real debate.

In the “real world” we have requirements for materials and tools and practices because some are less safe. Imagine if a building was welded with a technique that could fail? We’d legislate away from that technique. Even when people say “there are ways to make unsafe welding ‘safe enough’”.

Software could maybe use some rigor even if it means “go slow and don’t break things”.

I think regulating against unsafe languages like C might be one of the few agreeable rules. But I'd be concerned it would end up regulating in a mountain of useless design patterns and bloat which could freeze the state of software development.

If these laws came out 20 years ago I'd imagine we'd still all be using Java with UML diagrams legally required.

Software isn't all that different. There are plenty of things that the government could mandate.

For example, there could be coverage requirements. Want to work on software that determines if a bridge will be safe or not? Then you need 100% branch coverage.

You gave as an example something from a building code. That's just a test case. There's no reason why for common types of software (CAD, fluid simulators) we could not have repositories of test cases that you must pass to within some tolerance. You could even make it adverserial and let people suggest new test cases.

Or we could decide on some reference implementation that you must either match, or exceed. So if you design CAD software, on any input that both your CAD software can handle that this reference implementation can too, you must match. That's more of a programmatic open ended test case.

If we're worried about discrimination, there's no reason why the the government couldn't publish a set of typical profiles (fake names, locations, credit scores, etc.) that your algorithm must treat equally to within some tolerance.

etc.

We can totally regulate software like we do other engineering disciplines. If we wanted to and thought that the resulting increase in cost and slowdown in development is important enough.

Code coverage is not a very useful metric. It’s very easy to have 100% coverage without really testing anything. It works as a vague measure of test quality as long as none of the developers care about the value. As soon as they start making the coverage stat a goal itself, it becomes useless.

Code coverage tells you code was executed, not tested. What a worthless metric.

I think the regulation should happen upstream of the software. Code that goes in a medical device should be subject to different levels of rigor than code that goes into a free to play mobile game.

To use your example of CAD software, certainly the system used to design a bridge should be built differently than the one used to make inputs to a consumer level 3D printer.

There’s no such thing as a “casual” bridge or a “good enough” pacemaker, but that analogy holds in the software industry.

Software’s infinite flexibility means that it should be regulated within its context of use.

Software - or computer systems - are regulated in cases where it matters. Airplane stuff is regulated by the FAA. Medical devices are regulated by the FDA. One of those "sudden acceleration" suits went against the mfg partly because they hadn't followed proper coding standards. Credit card stuff is regulated by the industry rather than government under the pci-dss standard. Cloud providers advertise as being hipaa compliant, so that set of rules must have a technical component.

I have worked on medical devices and HIPAA controlled data. I have seen PhDs leading their field work next to a college grad who didn't even have a CS degree work on the same code. Trust me: you do not want to be operated on by a robot made by the kid out of college.

> ... governments regulated something like if your code touches important data, it must either be written in a verified safe language like Rust?

You are making a strawman.

Having a professional body that people could be ejected from makes a lot of sense in case of egregious misconduct and malice.

In events like Boeing 747 MAX, the car emission defeat device, backdoors & spyware, engineers should have safe channels to report wrongdoing, and get legal protection, but also face expulsion if they say nothing and.

I can guarantee you that "We have to add a bureaucracy to fix all of this" won't actually fix anything.

I've seen proposals for regulating software engineers. They've all been transparent and embarrassing land-grabs. One (thankfully) failed effort in California was basically a series of electrical engineering requirements with a little bit of firmware focus, and some idiotic-even-at-the-time development methodology; absolutely useless for the stated purpose.

> I can guarantee you that "We have to add a bureaucracy to fix all of this" won't actually fix anything.

Is that based on some expertise? Many, many other professions - almost all, I think - have professional licensing bodies and they function well. I think we can figure it out too.

They appear to function well to people who havent got a clue what they're talking about.

By and large they are either worthless or actively harmful.

Could you provide a basis for that claim? I haven't heard it from the many people I know in those professions, who appear to respect their licensing bodies.

Don't know about other professions, but all of the proposals I've seen for licensing software engineers have been highly bogus (with lot of irrelevant material) and politically suspect.

Here's a great summary:

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/2010-...

The observations about the program in Texas mirror what I've seen in similar proposals in California. Namely, tests that concentrate on EE and hardware, with the occasional toss-in of some lifecycle garbage that is not state-of-the-art, nor uncontested in value. The IEEE was behind at least one effort to bring software engineering under its umbrella, which would explain why the state thinks software engineers need to know stuff like Kirchhoff's law and impedance matching. You can go your whole software engineering career without needing that.

The proponents don't seem to actually care about what's in the tests, just that they license people, get the fees, and make room for further power grabs. It's pretty unlikely that any improvement in software is going to spring from that kind of arrangement.

Licensing is just more "Keep beating the engineers until things improve" with a taste of "Nice career you have here, be a shame if something happened to it, right?" thrown in. We already get that in industry, why invite the government, too?

I get that you are unhappy about it but (no disrespect intended) that doesn't tell me anything. I know it's common, but the more exaggerated, emotional language I see, the less interest or faith I have in the reasoning and knowledge of the argument.

Tell me this, you discovered that your employer stores the user password in plain text. You propose change, but they refused; who do you report? In my experience, pretty much nothing happen until shit hits the bed, there's pretty much zero professionalism in the industry outside of some semi-autistic and OCD people that can't stand this stuff and decides to do it correctly by spending the weekend making sure things are build with correctness in mind. Most people just write stuff until it "works" and leave it at that.

The problem in this scenario isn't software engineering necessarily, it's lack of punishment. Companies do things like this because it's cheap and they can factor in security breaches as simply a cost of doing business. A lot of these problems come as a result of an engineer prototyping or creating something on a tight budget, which then eventually gets deployed out either because said engineer leaves or against their own wishes.

It's similar to housing. Training engineers to build a house correctly doesn't matter if the punishment for the house not meeting code is a slap on the wrist for their employer. Because their employer will just tell them to build fast and ignore the right way to build something.

The problem is that the current regulations around the PEng (Canada) and the PE (US) are nonsense when it comes to software. They don't lead to more accountability. They don't lead to better software. Getting a PEng or a PE is a liability, you're wasting your time as a student instead of learning something useful.

To get a PEng or PE you have to take courses in, and pass an exam that covers, topics like power systems. This is a good idea for say a civil or mechanical engineer, since whatever they design will physically interface with all sorts of systems. They need that breadth otherwise accidents will happen.

But software engineering is different. The problems with crappy software that lead to deaths, unfairness, etc. have nothing to do with software engineers not understanding power systems. Having people pass such exams contributes nothing to safety.

Licensing organizations refuse to change. So they're simply not relevant to software. And as software grows, they're losing their grip on what is already the leading engineering discipline by far. There are more CS graduates (65k) every year than electrical (17k), chemical (8k), mechanical (20k), and civil engineers (15k) combined. Soon there will be more CS grads every year (65k) than all engineers combined (83k).

I don't believe the US even has a PE for software engineering any longer. I think something like 80 people got it after Texas initiated it.

> Right now when software kills people, they chock it up to a system or hardware failure.

Where do you see this happening?

99.99% of software engineers don’t touch safety critical code. There is no reason to regulate them. It’s much better to regulate the safety critical products.

> Right now when software kills people, they chock it up to a system or hardware failure.

This is sensationalism. Systems involving safety usually have an associated ISO standard. If it's not being followed, there's more at fault than just the SW engineer.

In many (all?) states, designing and building something that has safety implications requires a PE license by law - it doesn't matter if it's mostly a SW product or not. The individual engineers don't need the license, but someone in the chain does, and he/she is required to review the work, and it is his/her ass on the line if something goes wrong.

Is software engineer a regulated title in Ontario? I’m working here, as a software engineer (remotely mind you), and have no special credential…

I think so... but I'm neither a lawyer nor an engineer...

"PEO considers non-licensed use of “Software Engineer” to be a violation of our Act."

https://www.peo.on.ca/public-protection/complaints-and-illeg...

Texas may have a lot of f'd things about their laws, but one thing that they do very well is their "sunset commission". I think it's every 12 years or so, every department/licensure organization comes up for review, and they basically need to re-explain why they should exist. The idea is to prevent these organizations that turn into little fiefdoms to protect their own power.

A couple years ago the state veterinary board sued an Austin animal shelter leader and no-kill advocate and tried to have her license revoked. The sunset commission reamed them a new one, pointing out the absurdity of them going after a nonprofit leader while they had a major problem with vet drug abuse that they weren't handling. IIRC the majority of the vet board ended up resigning.

The sunset commission is a great idea. Similar to what you mentioned, we really need "garbage collection" for for laws, regulation, boards, departments, etc. A periodic review and cleanup of legal and organizational garbage.

I think this situation is unpleasant and there are losers with no winners. That being said, I can see the perspective of the licensing board.

Presumably the point of the PE title is a reliable stamp that means "this person is a solid, educated, experienced and politically neutral individual who will keep your buildings standing". It isn't appropriate for engineers to weigh in on political questions about how people should live their lives in their professional capacity.

This is a lesson I suspect the software semi-engineering profession will learn when the cost of the political battles Silicon Valley is engaged in start to come due. Much like in religious contexts "be good" somehow morphs into "spill blood" when people try to control what others can and cannot do. Engineers should not go anywhere close to even the outskirts of that fight. Whoever wins it deserves a functioning, well engineered society.

Strong Towns is cool with me, but it is a political project trying to do good. That sits in tension with professional engineering. Engineers do good, but not with activism.

The world sure would be easy if we could just label what street designers do as "engineering work beyond redoubt" and every opposition as "[political] activism". But of course it isn't. It is long known that making oversized streets encourages speeding. Yet they keep designing them oversized. It is well researched that "sharrows" do nothing. Yet they keep painting them. Their work is not that of engineers, it's work from guidelines that are of course the result of politics first and foremost.

Politics is war, and everything is politics.

That's not reality. Societies and people often cooperate for the greater good, often through government.

Occasionally when at war with a common enemy.

I have to disagree. Professional certification, degrees, etc are not the same as licensing and responsibility for reviewing and approving a specific project. In most jurisdictions I can use the title of Doctor and it is easily determined that I am not a medical doctor but have a PhD in Computer Science.

The abuse that professional engineers have received for various freedom of speech actions are chilling and disgusting. When some one earns the title of PE they don't lose their rights to have and publicly express opinions. https://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2017/04/28/...

Sometimes the only way to get things fixed is through political activism. And some times the things that need fixing overlap with decisions and solutions that engineers implement. Leaded gas wasn't just invented, produced, distributed, legalized, transported, sold, burned, by one person.

That’s just not how the world works in any sense. Regulations themselves are political, and professional engineers are the ones you want pushing for development of regulations, not career politicians!

Otherwise we wouldn’t have things like aviation safety regulations etc.

"[P]olitically neutral individual" -- I'm confused by this part. Can a vocally left-leaning professional engineer still do a good job when the client is vocally right-leaning? I expect so. And vice versa. I see no conflict of interest.

Deeper: What does that term even mean? It is so vague and snarky, I am struggling to understand your purpose. What kind of person (in _any_ democratic country) is highly educated but politically neutral? None that I know. To be clear: I do not consider "centrist" and "neutral" the same.

Another thing: Lots of medical doctors had strong (political) views against smoking tobacco before it was so popular to rail again Big Tobacco. Should we muzzle them also?

Last one: All highly-developed countries have very strict rules about who can practice law. Many of these lawyers lead the effort to fight discriminatory laws and rulings against minorities/less-priveleged in their respective countries. Again: Should we also restrict this profession to only "politically neutral individuals"?

> Can a vocally left-leaning professional engineer still do a good job when the client is vocally right-leaning?

Yeah, exactly. They have to be professionally neutral.

> Should we muzzle them also?

He'd not being muzzled. As he points out in the linked article, he "ha[s] not practised engineering for more than a decade". That is probably a factor in the boards decision - he is clearly using an official title that is supposed to be politically neutral in political activism. This is clear because he is not doing engineering.

I personally agree with his activism, but it is out of line with what engineering strives for as a discipline.

> Should we also restrict this profession to only "politically neutral individuals"?

There is no need for politically neutral lawyers. Law isn't a matter of dealing with an objective reality in the same way engineering or medicine are. Although they do use logic, law isn't a technical field.

And I do think that license restrictions on who can be a lawyer are deeply questionable, although as time passes I do better understand the perspective for for forcing people who want to be judges to engage with traditional culture.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com