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Comment by cityofghosts | Hacker News Reader

i dont understand why people who write code consider themselves engineers. they arent liable if their code breaks. they have no professional licensing system. they dont even need an education.

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16611821 and marked it off-topic.

There's a lot of debate about what kind of activity software development is. The camp that doesn't see it as engineering argues that programming is a craft, or that code is "grown".

I think one of the key differentiators for engineering is that something engineered should work by design after it has been built (not including regular maintenance of a machine). A defect requires a special process to repair all built instances.

In software development, defects are a regular occurrence requiring continuing changes, and requirements change as well. Of course, that's very different from a bridge or a combustion engine for example.

Automated testing can help push software development _toward_ an engineering mindset.

BTW - you're right that most software devs don't need licensing or formal education, but it comes off as pejorative. While those could help set standards, some of the most talented people I've worked with have neither (and some of my class mates in college don't affirm a benefit for formal training).

In software development you are solving new problems continually. If you weren't you could just call a library function with some parameters and be done with it.

Structural engineering is much like calling library functions with certain parameters and then making sure it all works and is safe. You know how what you are constructing differs from existing buildings and use that to decide what to do. You don't (usually) invent new ways of building things or building things that are unlike anything that was built before.Therefore such projects are well-known engineering practice, and your skill and knowledge of those practices can be tested and you can be licensed.

Some software development is like that too but most is not, you are creating new designs all the time because your software is for new purposes, not to replace something existing with perhaps a slightly improved version. It's hard to license anybody in "inventing new things".

Would it be too presumptuous to assume you have less structural engineering experience than you do with software?

You seem to be forgetting that vast majority of software development is churning out the same old buggy barely maintainable CRUD apps in dull enterprise environments or for tight fisted agency clients.

Precisely. I would have been less charitable in my response. Most software development is plumbing. To say we're solving new problems all the time and then to set that in some unclear opposition to what structural engineers do... I mean, just like software, each SE's project is different and yet similar across cases. That's uninformative, to say that least. So if you want to contrast them, it's best to actually know what you're talking. Also, I always hated occupational narcissism. It's a sign of narrow-mindedness.

(Besides, the question about whether software development is engineering or craft is very much real. John Allen, John McCarthy, Bertrand Meyer and Peter Denning have all written interesting things about this subject.)

There are those of us who write code who are licensed engineers. In certain jurisdictions you just be, and are liable, if the code you write has an impact on public safety.

Try being responsible for the monthly billing runs when (on your first £1 Million month) when the CTO nudges you and says this had better be right or we are both out of a job :-)

This actually happened to me back when I worked for Telecom Gold

Unrelated? Licensing and liability have nothing to do with interest and fascination, which is what the post you responded to was about.

Since many engineers aren’t licensed will they also have to stop referring to themselves as engineers?

In some places, yes. Ontario, for example, imposes hefty fines on individuals who use the an engineering title without accreditation.

The article is dated in February.

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