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Comment by hnthrow0287345 | Hacker News Reader

This would be more meaningful if, perhaps, we had to swear an oath to it before being able to practice. And practitioners would be treated more seriously if everyone knew we swore that oath. And the legal utility as accountability and defense would also be useful.

Of course people are going to ignore it if there's no force behind it.

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Professional liability and licensure would create assurances with some teeth, but there are some major drawbacks.

Enlighten us to these drawbacks. On the surface I am inclined to say the pros would outweigh the cons. Compared to other professions, software engineering seems to struggle the most with H-1B/Green Card abuse and interview processes. Job interviews are absurdly different (easier) for doctors, lawyers, et al. than for software engineers, and that I believe is because of the licensure. I do think licensure adds overhead to an industry (e.g., malpractice insurance, governing bodies, license management) and that probably discourages anyone with real power (like FAANG) to pursue it and try to set it as an industry-wide standard. Most software engineers in the U.S. are making around $130-140k, but lawyers and medical doctors usually make significantly more (perhaps because of the licensure overhead - I'm not sure if malpractice insurance is included in a medical doctor's salary- I would imagine it's not and is taken out of each paycheck like any other industry's health insurance benefits).

> "Job interviews are absurdly different (easier) for doctors, ..."

The job interview for doctors is a 5-7 year residency under tight supervision of an attending physician: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residency_(medicine) . People do flunk or drop out as well, meaning they can never become a physician. There's nothing easier about that.

I think the parent commenter agrees with you: because there is tight quality assurance and - in many countries - a license needed to practice medicine, the interviewer can just trust the system instead of having to evaluate the competence of the applicant through questions and coding assignments.

(I'm not sure whether I agree with the commentator that a SE license would be that helpful in practice.)

I’ve been a software engineer for over a decade. At what point is my “residency” over? At what point does the “community” decide I can write software with some level of competency and don’t need to solve fizz buzz over and over again?

It seems to work somewhat with medical doctors and the Hippocratic Oath.

But I would argue it is way easier there. Building software has way more grey areas.

I don't think there are more grey areas in software engineering than in medicine. The difference is the feedback loop of the outcome - if you design a dopamine slot machine you will ruin the generation and that's a long arc.

And that makes it hard. I am open for banning all comercial advertisement - but general society is largely fine with it. So is someone designing new targeting algorithm for ads breaking his potential oath of doing good for society?

What grey areas are there for doctors?

Prescribing meds which you could avoid while receiving 'courses' from Key Opinion Leaders in fancy places from the pharma companies. This ranges from antibiotics through psychotropics and up until the pain meds. You can argue some of it is on the safe side, some may be beneficial, etc. Should you accept an invitation to a conference which will increase your skills?

Tangential, but where do you draw the line on commercial advertisement? If a podcast is sponsored by a business & supports behavior the business benefits from, is the podcast advertising? What if it also contains useful educational content related to that activity?

There probably will never be a clear line and none of this is realistic, but I would start with banning all flashy light polluting physical advertisements. Any advertisement people cannot evade.

A podcast I can choose to listen or not. A news site I can also evade. But any (internet) service people must use, should be ad free. Ideally all of society, but any regulation here will have a hard time in the real world.

Canadians do

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