Comment by thyristan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thyristan | Hacker News Reader

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Professional Engineers signed off on on broken dams (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brumadinho_dam_disaster ), leaking chemical plants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster ), exploding reactors and how (not) to operate them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster ) and "high enough" sea walls (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident ). There are a ton more examples. All highly unethical, most of the responsible engineers got away scot-free.

Licensed professions only serve to increase the scarcity of licensed professionals, drive up the price and thereby form an economic cartel. Neither does it prevent any of the aforementioned disasters, nor are the responsible professionals held liable.

"Licensed professionals" is one of those myths in software engineering cycles that won't die. A license won't make anyone competent. It will, however, provide them with an excuse to charge more, do less and ascribe any fuckups to "must be something else wrong, I did everything to board standards"...

That's a weird set of anecdotes you've chosen. The first half of those incidents are in fact the opposite of what you seem to be complaining about: finding the Professional Engineers that signed off on the mistakes in the project is hard to do because they happened in countries that failed to regulate Professional Engineering licenses.

The Chernobyl disaster is an operation mistake, which a Professional Engineer may have signed the process for operation, but an operational failure to follow process is not the Professional Engineer's fault. Sure, a professional will try to narrow processes to be as fool-proof as possible, but you can't entirely blame a professional that the planet is capable of generating far more fools than you can plan for.

The Fukushima disaster actually shows Professional Engineering consequences with multiple engineering groups doing analysis and investigations of what went wrong and whether or not to indict Professional Engineers involved in the construction. None of those moved to such indictments, but it was investigated at length. Three of the executives of the company were indicted as a part of those investigations (and then were judged "not guilty" in a Japanese court of law).

"Licensed professionals" is not a myth. A license isn't about making anyone competent, it is about applying consequence when they aren't. It's also about having your back when you are worried about possible consequences. "I can't do that because I would lose my license" is a threat companies have to take seriously. If your company wants to force you to pursue it anyway, you can take the issue to the Ethics Committee at your licensing board/professional organization and they can help you examine the legal, ethical, and moral implications in a way that could result in consequences to your company. If all of that is documented and the company still does it anyway it is easier to get legal consequences applied to company executives, such as real, deserved jail time.

In the Brumadinho case, five engineers were arrested and charged and jailed. They are out of jail and a criminal case is ongoing.

In the Bhopal disaster, seven engineers and executives were convicted of causing death by negligence and give the maximum penalty (which was pretty weak).

The Chernobyl incident led to Anatoly Dyatlov to be jailed and getting a 10-year sentence.

For Fukushima, some people were charged with professional negligence causing death but they beat the charges in court.

Licensing will not make anybody competent. But it can help keep incompetent people out of our field. When Engineers screw up, their malpractice insurance may get too expensive for them to continue to work in the field. When management asks for something unethical, it gives a pretty good reason for pushing back.

Can you imagine how much worse it would be without that? Because how do you show the negative? There have definitely been cases where professionally licensed engineers have said no, or refused to sign off on something, or walked off the job, or otherwise have changed the course of human history for the better because of that code of ethics. That there have been failures in the system doesn't indight the concept as a whole. Software runs the world these days, it's time to grow up.

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