Comment by robocat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robocat | Hacker News Reader

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Do you feel like an inadiquate imposter or something? I'm assuming you work in software.

Watch some engineers in other disciplines and you soon recognise that many of them have about the same responsibility as a software engineer. Design is design.

Or read about engineering failures like flight QF32 (mostly a success story):

  A paperwork review showed that the required signatures were missing from 131 out of 138 retrospective concessions issued between 2009 and 2011

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-...

Australian Quantas, with a UK Rolls Royce engine on an Airbus, with engines maintained in Aussie.

Safety is now often made up of interlocking: regulations, standards, quality systems, safety management systems, insurance, international legal contracts. Certified engineers and signatures are usually only a very small part of those systems.

Certification matters less than you might think across international borders.

Perhaps I'm a cynic, but beliefs in certification seem so irrational to me. What is it? Jealous desires for status? Desire to have guilds/gatekeepers? Complete misunderstanding of how safety occurs in "real" engineering?

Your conclusion seems at odds with your evidence: the quote you reference indicates that a professional engineer was meant to examine the 'retrospective concessions' and did not. The result was that no qualified engineer was taking responsibility for their quality. Fixing the process meant getting credentialed engineers to assess and incur liability for the solutions, which is how the professional engineering licensure system is supposed to work.

>Safety is now often made up of interlocking: regulations, standards, quality systems, safety management systems, insurance, international legal contracts. Certified engineers and signatures are usually only a very small part of those systems.

I mean, you make my point. At no point did I say engineers are the only required component, but without the responsibility of an engineer signing off on its technical adequacy we have loads of historical proof that people end up dead far more often.

You believe signatures by engineers matter.

That is your belief, but I've never seen that belief backed by fact.

Most open source software disowns liability in CAPS in the license. Yet somehow FOSS like Linux gets used for safety critical infrastructure.

Microsoft would love certification requirements for engineers - that would kill open source to their conpetitive benefit.

Do you honestly think if we required Microsoft Certified Professionals to sign the internals of Microsoft OS then Windows would be more secure or reliable?

The bigger issue is that signatures and criminal consequences hardly matter across jurisdictions.

The capitalist issue is that businesses want scapegoats when things go wrong. That would be the outcome of signatures: engineers as fallboys for systemic failures across organisations.

Note how often pilots are blamed for accidents due to the design of planes.

It is just an idealistic belief based on feelies that software certification would achieve the goals you imagine it would.

Signatures are an anachronism: from an alien past.

International business uses different mechanisms for safety.

Our world is intertwined complexity. You somehow think that the buck should stop at engineers?

If engineers signed off on everything then we'd have no more disasters like New Orleans floods?

Who signed what for the Grenfell towers tragedy? Which engineers were reprimanded? Did they decide that more signatures would help prevent future disasters?

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