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Seems to me like your comment is simply an example of prejudice.
You're just describing another standardized incentive structure that you're operating in, and using that as a basis to extrapolate that programmers of all kinds—whether they work on a video platform or on machinery that could cause catastrophe if it fails—are implicitly careless careerists who refuse responsibility by nature.
Hubris is the single biggest downfall, whether it's pegged on insecurity, or a false sense of knowledge, superiority or entitlement.
The very best and most experienced people I know have deep expertise, and maintain a healthy mistrust of their own work to keep an eye on it and improving it.
Real world experience and run history is a big thing, and people can re-learn the lessons of the past over and over with their egos, or also be open to learning from others to learn quicker.
The hubris comes from the fact that the CEO doesn't hear the problems that Directors don't disclose.
The hubris comes from the fact that the Directors don't hear the problems that Senior Managers don't disclose.
The hubris comes from the fact that the Senior Managers don't hear the problems that Managers don't disclose.
And Managers simply don't care to hear the problems that Engineers face because "shuddup and close that Jira ticket within 48 hour or else".
(definitions)
The terms hubris, ate, nemesis, and tisis originated in ancient Greece and had specific meanings and roles in everyday life.
Hubris
“Hubris” was a fundamental concept in the lives of the ancient Greeks and was used to describe someone who overestimated their abilities and behaved in an arrogant and offensive manner toward others, toward the laws of the state, but above all toward the gods.
According to ancient beliefs, such acts of hubris offended and enraged the gods.
Ate
“Hubris” consequently provoked the intervention of the gods, and especially Zeus, who sent “ate”—that is, a clouding or blinding of the mind—upon the hubristic person.
Nemesis
“Ate” led the hubristic person to commit further acts of hubris, until they committed a grave folly or fell into a very serious error, which provoked “nemesis”—that is, the wrath and vengeance of the gods.
Tisis
Next comes “tisis,” that is, the punishment and ruin or destruction of the person who committed hubris.Eg. architects vs construction engineers vs land surveyors vs construction designers vs urban planners… anyone of them thinks that their profession is more valuable than the others…
Members of The American Society of Civil Engineers conduct themselves with integrity and professionalism, and above all else protect and advance the health, safety, and welfare of the public through the practice of Civil Engineering.
The first tenant of a software engineers code of ethics is:
fuck it, make the boss some money.
Or, formally, according to the ACM:
Contribute to society and human well-being.
Which means fuck-all and includes absolutely zero enforcement like it does for real engineering professions. So do us all a favor and don't whine about our discipline's lack of standards while dipshits who call themselves software engineers are tokenmaxxing a pile of shit and SEO optimizing manipulative user environments for profit.
The ‘incentive structure’ is non-financial and based on the ethics of valuing other humans. This is a professional duty. To even call it a ‘incentive structure’ feels like it’s missing the point.
the ethical objectives are supported by disincentives, offsetting the financial incentives to misbehave.
and none of that exists in software engineering (yet).
This license requires the holder to uphold code of professional ethics, and makes the engineer themselves be personally responsible for the safety and viability of the design itself. Losing a PE license is rare, but it does happen. The industry board (usually a regional board) can also discipline/reprimand engineers who fail to meet the professional standard - rubber stamping projects, personal misconduct, etc. Losing a license is a huge deal, but even reprimands can have a serious negative impact on someone's career.
In the industry the previous commenter works in their hypothetical would absolutely meet the bar for discipline or reprimand.
Depending on the country, there's also a level you need to attain as lawyer to argue in higher courts.
Every decision to increase the cost of a product is taking that money out of the customer's pocket which they then can't use to buy more nutritious food or medicine or make rent and avoid becoming homeless. Every additional tax dollar spent on inflating the cost of an infrastructure project is one that can't be spent on cancer research or Pell grants or catching pedos. Moreover, that type of "tax" is highly regressive because when you make e.g. housing cost more, only the poor become unable to afford it.
Meanwhile the system you're referring to gives the engineers the incentive to be excessively risk-averse. Give someone the authority to command that resources be allocated to something and liability for not allocating them but no liability for what happens to the people the resources were allocated from and the result is not an optimal system.
If you're making a bridge usable by residents of Springfield, that bridge has to be in Springfield, and it has to be made by Springfield engineers following Springfield laws.
Yeah, that’s the point. That incentive structure includes going to prison, and employers aren’t willing to die on that hill because it exposes them to insane liability if they go against a certified Professional Engineer.
and that's why trains work but you have to pay a higher price to use it, while youtube is shitty, and breaks often, but it's free to use.
It is about the trade offs - not the trade offs that someone talks about passively, but actual action based trade offs; ala voting with their feet.
This is false. Nothing is free.
We watch ads. We are tracked like animals. That time, attention and loss of privacy *is* payment. For this, it’s reasonable to expect a service that aspires to rise above shit-show.
Which proves something about ads: there's a law of conservation of ads. If you're not claiming the ad space, your upstream suppliers will.
This isn't because you're a "real" engineer, it's because of regulation and industry licensing around specific engineering disciplines that didn't exist until the start of the 20th century. Railroad engineers in the 1800's didn't have the same set of regulations to follow, or the same liability for mistakes.
Software engineering could have similar regulation and licensing set up, though I think you'd find it to be an impossible uphill battle in today's world against the lobbying power of the big tech companies.
Bill Gates who became a billionaire out of writing software built a company that always had as a mission commoditizing software engineering work
Professionals (members of a profession) self-police, something software engineers don’t do.
The Bar exam in the US didn't start until the 1780's, so lawyers before then weren't "real" professionals either?
It's a ridiculous argument.
A better one might be that the externalities and opportunities for software engineering to kill people, or be directly tied to deaths or negative outcomes, didn't exist or weren't well enough documented until recently. As an immature field/industry that's not surprising, but it does point to a responsibility by the community to push for standards that don't currently exist.
I don't think this belief is entirely justified, but as programmers, it's really hard to predict when our actions suddenly become life-threatening, so the belief persists.
My college ethics professor told us a story where a few people died at some concert somewhere in South America, because a software developer at a data analytics company pushed a config change that made all apps with their SDK crash on launch, and that included the ticket app needed to get into the concert venue. The mob, when learning that they wouldn't be seeing their favorite artists due to a software bug, got very agitated and trampled a few people to death.
So it wasn't even anything related to the app's purpose, it was a frivolous surveillance SDK that got people killed.
I went through an acquisition as a Canadian software developer getting acquired by an American company. They wanted us to be called engineers like the rest of their SWEs but in Canada it’s a protected namespace. It’s illegal to call yourself an engineer without having the ring and the papers. Which personally I can appreciate.
Also, I'm Canadian as well, and almost everyone calls themselves "software engineer" these days. You just can't say P.eng. in your title. You could be forced to remove it from linkedin/etc if you're called out, but it rarely happens.
It's not a protected title in Sweden, but we still refused, because we were nothing like engineers. We were a minuscule team of mostly self-taught hackers who happened to be employed to solve business problems in a system for managing other companies and their customers. I had some idea of the rigour of engineering but my colleagues did not, still, they also weren't willing to appropriate the title.
This lead to meetings with this person being quite uncomfortable at times, embarrassing even. To me it was an obvious sign that they were unfit for managing roles. Two thirds of the team, me included, resigned at the same time after they had been increasingly active in the management of the technical department.
Since he was on the board the CEO could not get rid of him even though he knew that this person was destroying the dev team.
I can also tell my tools to automate my work once I understand it well enough.
One of my more senior colleagues at that company called himself a 'fixer', because to his understanding, what he did was fix things.
Yup, most don't have the spine to stand up for their moral as they grew up creating low-stake toys. On top of that we have been unable to establish the rigour (proofs, automated-verification, proper design thinking beyond the next 2 quarters) and doing so is really hard and often doesn't have drawbacks comparable to losing speed against teams that just keep throwing stuff at the wall.
When the rat presses a lever, don't blame the rat. This is super reductionist of course, but I always keep it in mind.
Does this happen because train companies just decided to care or because regulators got involved? I believe it was the later. Regulation is often derided here on HN but good regulation does improve things.
Generally speaking i agree that we need better control over titles and competence but youtube is still an incredibly massive engineering achievement as a platform, has been extremely reliable all things considered, and it's been mostly built by people without those certifications or regulations.
I'm a programmer working in healthcare. If I ignore a safety issue anyone discovered, people die and we go to prison. Am I an engineer now?
Other examples of critical software systems include banking and voting.
I have never _ever_ called myself an engineer even when I was encouraged to.
It is foolish to leave this field unregulated.
The point I am trying to make is that we are building a society on software that has no legally binding standards but has serious impacts to all of us.
agentically vibe coding a website with some minor manual tweaks? adding bullshit to a product for the pure purpose of profit maximization at the detriment of the end user? moving fast, testing user engagement instead of user safety, and being okay with breaking things? .... not engineering !
following an agreed set of processes to formally maximise product safety & consistency eg. adhering to medical device standards for software development? .... engineering!
The civil engineer who builds a great suspension bridge probably looks down on the one who builds a bridge over a irrigation ditch in a rural county using a big metal pipe covered with dirt.
Much like you may look down on train builders who make the novelty trains for kids parks.
Software engineering happens to be useful everywhere and most stuff in life is low stakes and the economics do not exist to make it perfect.
However, in aerospace, banking, and other high stakes industries software engineering projects are met with the rigor that is called for.
If a programmer fucked up something "train leaks" related and he ignored that because of xyz, there would be trouble.
Train safety issues kill people.
Licenses and reprimands are not bulletproof as those are often portrayed: take 737MAX for example, or Ford Pinto, or bridges, which fail every day as it seems
the only good investigation on the matter I've seen is this one: https://www.hillelwayne.com/talks/crossover-project/
and it states that yes, software engineers are in fact engineers -- and some investigation of the same order of magnitude is needed to disprove it
Programming is not serious engineering because real engineers don't half ass everything. <- you are here
No wait, programming is serious engineering because the way they do things is shit too.
Source: Aerospace employmennt
Jumping to a pretty general conclusion there. Incentive packages like the parent described are not the norm.
You can blame the subsequent action on the individual but if the footage leaked due to a bug Google refused to fix are they completely blameless?
2. If you upload sensitive footage to a public video sharing website, I don't really have any concern for that footage being leaked.
Introduce the same system at train engineering companies and you'll get the same result.
Us engineers do have our priorities straight.
The problem isn't the programmers ffs. In your industry, if your superior orders you (or creates the incentive) to hide bad stuff under the rug, you have the ability to push back, at least to some degree.
Programmers? We don't have that. Maybe the few of us who actually work on security critical stuff, but some generic AI BS? No chance. You're being treated as a cog.
Naturopaths and chiropractors are licensed to do various things too, physicians, etc.. a license does not imply that there would otherwise exist a culture of responsibility, foundation in evidence or anything of the sort. It's an incentive structure and regulatory practice. One may even keep their license while being a monster and abusing other incentive structures that don't have a bearing on that license.
Software engineers are not typically licensed as engineers, that's all one can say without dipping into prejudice.
For example, a project gets a safety managers assigned who has to sign off the release. Project management is explicitly not superior to this safety manager. In most cases these safety managers are just there review stuff according to some process guidelines. If there is pressure (project is late, etc), there are more senior safety managers to call in and they will usually make more nuanced safety arguments (in this specific case, violate this guideline, but at least do X as mitigation).
In the end there is bureaucracy. Things need to be signed and archived for potential law suits. Not having archived things will be even worse in the law suits.
The upside: As a programmer, you don't need to argue that you need some time for unit testing.
The downside: 100% test coverage is mandatory and it really gets enforced.
Alternatively, perhaps Google has a culture problem where it encourages crap like this?
Thinking software developers have done no wrong (deliberately or not) ever is just borderline naive.
But people gotta eat and all so who am I to blame.
ETA: Admittedly the above is getting off-topic from YouTube, but I can easily imagine a scenario where an instructional video was deleted due to a spurious copyright strike or some other stupidity.