Google snippets aren’t helping me in my search for general principles of engineering. Any certified engineers care to share? Or someone want to ask chatGPT to confabulate some?
As far as I can see there is no ethical accountability for the programmers at big tech companies. People are happy to pocket the crazy salaries and claim their managers or execs should be blamed for the damaging outcomes of their work.
Sure it helps to have established bodies to hold engineers accountable and report violations to, but I certainly don't think the ethics training is a significant factor. There's no shortage of degreed engineers signing off on things far more ethically questionable than most of what big tech is doing.
This also sounds pretty optimistic as a generalisation: > people refuse to sign off on work they don't understand or aren't confident in
Instead you’d claim that the key distinction is that engineering requires a legal/moral duty to accountability.
Is that a general consensus here?
I doubt it'll ever get adopted in the software industry, because we have many competent people doing good work without a software engineering degree, and degrees of low enough quality employers do whiteboard coding tests at interview, so there's not really a notion of a 'properly qualified' programmer.
At least in France, the biggest difference between an engineering degree and someone who learned by themselves are going to be:
* the engineer should have more general knowledge about databases, algorithms etc.. and generally how things work. Someone who didn't get that training might not have as deep an understanding in those fundamental concepts (that gap is sometime very very visible when working together). That's the most important part in the day-to-day.
* the engineer will have at least a decent English level. Not an issue in English-speaking country obviously, but that's actually the number 1 reason some students don't get their degree in schools I know.
* the engineer should be able to present well his ideas, and generally be at least good in communication. There is formal training to speak in public. If you are shy by nature, this may not come easy without formal training.
That's about it. There is no special skill that someone determined cannot acquire by themselves with freely available training and experience, but when you are a teenager with little self-motivation, it helps to get all this drilled into you. On the other hand, I wouldn't hire most people coming out of my own school, so take it with a grain of salt.