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Comment by johnbellone | Hacker News Reader

The unfortunate truth here, for me at least, is that I end up talking to the same group of professionals that I know and trust for the past decade. We are all extremely successful but it often turns into an echo chamber and takes a long time for new ideas to gain a foot hold. I am a firm believer that our industry as a whole suffers from the lack of a "professional society" like some of the traditional engineering disciplines. We need a way to discuss, debate, and decide upon good practices. In a way, this what the RFC ecosystem supports, but it would be great if it were organized in a much better way.

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>> I am a firm believer that our industry as a whole suffers from the lack of a "professional society" like some of the traditional engineering disciplines.

Isn't that what the IEEE and ACM is for? I'd argue that there isn't a dearth in "professional/academic societies" or "guilds". If anything there are far too many of them. Before you fall into the trap of inventing the umpteenth "all-encompassing" computing guild, like in that XKCD comic, how about trying to address the underlying problem that you'd like to have solved?

It isn't a trap that I am going to fall into because it isn't a problem that I am trying to solve.

I firmly believe that the problem to solve is much closer to facilitating and recording the results of the ceremonies. That is effectively done in part by the above organizations but, in my opinion, the real problem lies with the follow up about implementation inside of the real world. I do think that USENIX is much better at _that_ than the ACM or IEEE.

I feel that I am in the same bucket. Especially with WEB/API architecture. I've got a decent set of architecture rules that have worked well for every company I've joined. But asides from minor syntax/style opinions, no one ever challenges these rules.

Likely because any consistent architecture is going to work fine. And the typical developer is writing code with a business need in mind. So it pays to stick to something simple rather than experiment with new design patterns.

> Likely because any consistent architecture is going to work fine.

This is also a worthwhile thing to keep in mind. Most decisions made right now are likely to not be an issue if they are consistent. That said, it is still nice to know where the scaling and operational issues may arise given these decisions. It is a fine line to walk between over-engineering and just having awareness of things to expect.

I'm a Member of the IET, but more because I want it to be useful and relevant to SE than because it honestly is. (And also because I studied EE/CS, and it's a bit better on EE. Still not great, much more on electrical than electronic.)

I do think that a significant reason why the existing professional societies aren't as effective as they could be is because we do not have licensure outside of specific technologies (e.g. Java, Oracle, Kubernetes, etc.). I am 100% sure that if I poll the software engineers that I work with on a daily basis that only a handful of them would be aware of the IET. A handful _may_ remember the ACM from their college days.

I'd guess you're in the US? I think it has a presence there, but more predominantly across the Commonwealth. I keep considering joining the ACM - actually probably less likely now I saw recently they free-ised the 'Digital Library' - but in my awareness/experience at least I think it's the opposite, not nearly as widely known/joined/read here as in the US. And not chartered in the UK, i.e. you couldn't be a CEng or whatever via the ACM.

(I'm not via The IET either, but could be in theory. That's part of the problem, it's difficult when there's a lack of resources or examples for our discipline - vs. plenty for others. I also sort of think if I managed it it would just be for the letters, it wouldn't actually be helpful or signify anything relevant. It would be nice if there were something to work towards and achieve in that regard that did actually mean something, and motivated working on useful things.)

While it would be nice to decide on best practices, I fear that the amount of cargo culting and NIH syndrome would quickly render the initiative pointless :-(

There is a place for a professional society but we need to think about it much differently than traditional engineering and closer to how the academic subculture operates. We're humans and we've been trying to figure out since the beginning of our existence how to effectively organize and communicate information, but making a decision on that information, that is the hard part.

The idea of an academic model definitely appeals to me. One thing I often struggle to find which is very common in academia is a literature review and a survey of common approaches. This sort of thing would be hugely valuablen tackling various challenges in building products and services.

Some examples we are currently tackling are secret management and rolling out updates. I can easily find products that promise to solve these. I can find some articles about "how we, at $COMPANY, solve this particular problem." If I am really lucky I can find one or two articles that answer "here is what we, at $COMPANY, do, and here are one or two alternatives we did not like for reasons relevant to our context." It is very difficult to find a proper review that lays out common patterns of implementation and gives a framework to discuss tradeoffs thereof.

Do you think traditional engineering culture is not an academic one?

My statement was meant to compare/contrast an academic subculture -- conferences, papers, discussions, debates -- with a professional society such as the NSPE. We do have our own share of professional societies that fit the bill but we do not have a requirement for licensure in our industry. By definition it is a different animal.

I also think that there are many organizations that have tried to provide a solution to the problem -- and arguably, solve it effectively -- such as the IETF, IET, etc., but we're at a interesting and exciting part of a field that is only a few decades old. We're still learning. There are thousands of graduates in our field that were not formally educated in computer science. That's not a requirement to be in the job.

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