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ulrashida

Professional engineers are typically:

* Regulated by a profession and associated legislation

* Work first to ensure the safety and welfare of the public

* Perform only within their area of competence

* Act as faithful agents or trustees for their clients

* Avoid deception and represent matters in an objective and truthful manner

* Invest in continuous professional development

* Can be subject to penalties for malpractice: removal of licence, fines, or jail

It's hard to see any of these applying to LLM input entry people. It's a even a stretch to consider them non-professional engineers.

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Hard to apply those to software engineering as well.

In most jurisdictions, a professional engineer is essentially a specific legal thing.

In most jurisdictions I am aware of, software engineers are not professional engineers. I am sure there are many exceptions.

That said, I think all of the above are rather easy to apply to SWE aside from, arguably, the first bullet point.

And I can list counter examples for each.

Civil engineers and architects don’t “move fast and break things” or “fake it til you make it” after a 3 month bootcamp.

There are software engineering domains, like aerospace, where the process is very stringent with rigorous planning and testing.

There are others, like consumer app development, where there's simply no need for that kind of process, so it doesn't exist. HNers might complain, but average people don't care if their social media app crashes once in a while and they have to restart it — so why should developers care? Better to spend their time on other stuff. Whereas people care a lot if their airplane crashes.

I don't think it suggests anything about the relative value of working in those domains.

But those consumer apps that use or sell personal data against that persons interests as a business model, or those that leak or lose personal information through negligence are very harmful to society. Why should they get a pass?

That's a totally unrelated argument. Plenty of "real" engineers work on weapons systems. Architects work on ultra luxury skyscrapers for Saudi businessmen. Civil engineers work on new highways that destroy poor neighborhoods. No one is talking about ethics here.

How is it unrelated if we’re talking about software engineering as a profession? Yes there are some SWEs working in engineering fields, but the majority are not classically “engineers”

Maybe you could explain how it's related? I feel like I did a good job of explaining how ethics makes no sense in this discussion in my above comment.

My original comment was that this list of engineering standards is not followed by most software engineering. You seem to be saying there are some that it can be applied ti, and I’m say those are in the minority.

Right — standards, not ethics. You still haven't explained how ethics matters here. Like I said, plenty of engineers that follow standards rigorously do it in the service of unethical goals.

Completely agree. It reminds me of 'They Write the Right Stuff' (1996) [1], how a group of engineers developed the software for the Space Shuttle.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

In the UK my computer science masters was a masters of engineering and I got some kind of engineering qualification (which I have since lost and have never used)

I disagree, I think 1-2 are not really applicable, but SWE has some stuff other engineering fields don't have, either.

You might be interested in this three article series https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/

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