I guess the best way to counteract this is well funded institutions whose purpose it is to fight that fight for us. I'm using this realization as an occasion to make a donation to the EFF.
God forbid people who love to use the title engineer will have to apply the rigour and standards of actual engineering to the work they do.
There are specific areas where it makes sense but doing it broadly will just halt all innovation.
It's starting to sound like a very good idea.
> There are specific areas where it makes sense but doing it broadly will just halt all innovation.
Or speed it by focusing efforts on well designed software.
And thanks to that software we are talking seamlessly over the net.
facepalm who ever said that? Are you trolling or what?
1) There are a lot of people doing engineering without a degree. One example: many makers are not engineers and they do a lot of good stuff anyway. What they don't do is taking legal responsibility because they are not allowed to. It's no warranty / no fitness for a purpose stuff. Similarly there is a lot of software with no warranty / no fitness clauses. History demonstrated that it's good enough to keep the world spinning.
2) Most people in the software industry do engineering jobs no matter if they have a degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering (I didn't check the USA name for that, sorry) or in anything else. I know very good software developers, maybe with an architect / engineer job title, with no degree at all or with a degree in Graphic Design or Philosophy or Agronomy. They moved to software development because they tinkered with their computers, wrote some programs and discovered that they are good at it. Nobody notices the difference after 5 or 10 years of work. The only downside it's a little narrowness of expertise: they have many more unknown unknowns because nobody systematically told them what's there outside and how it works, even at high level. One example: that good software developer with the Graphic Design degree told me once that he doesn't really know how networking works. To him it's the configuration screen of his Mac and HTTP calls from Node.js.
That would be the day HN starts a revolt.
In my brief reading I don't see any problems or privacy implications stemming from it. What about it are you referring to?
Should we expect professional software development to be fun? There's a lot of laws out there which arguably "suck the fun out of" civil engineering, but I certainly appreciate the fact that there are standards in place to try to keep bridges, tunnels and buildings from collapsing.
Maybe it's not the worst idea in the world to have enforced engineering standards for the digital built environment like we have for the non-digital built environment, and treat it less like a playground where programmers can do whatever they want?
Just a thought, I don't have very strong opinions on this topic.
If you're building infrastructure control systems, sure.
But for software that "enable human-to-human communication"?
Do we have engineering standards for printing out pamphlets, teaching foreign languages, inventing board games, writing a song?
To be fair, I haven't read the actual draft, just read some reporting about the implications for open source software.