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Comment by psychlops | Hacker News Reader

I don't think a country charging fees to bless a word makes a profession more or less real.

You should rethink that whenever you drive under a bridge or get on a boat. The reason they collapse or sink so infrequently is largely because engineers are accredited and held responsible.

Causality will be tough here. I could also credit the certification regulations just as much. And truth to tell, construction techniques are vital, yet we don't value the construction workers in this way.

That is, it is a whole system. And largely comes to costs and known building techniques. After all, certified engineers built "galloping gerdy."

(And I didn't even get into maintenance costs and application. )

Construction techniques are vital, but a civil engineer is employed to conduct the correct QA/QC on those techniques.

This doesn't devalue the effort of the work crew, but it does recognize you need accredited professionals at certain parts of the process to ensure public safety.

To be a bit more pointed: causality isn't difficult here. This legislation and professional practice was deliberately designed as a result of the numerous failures observed throughout the 1900s. The cause: multiple fatalities and unreliable infrastructure let to the regulation of the engineering profession. The effect: we are safer.

My point is that it is all of the regulation involved. Not just the single line worker that is the civil engineer. I know more than a few of those folks, and they are not some magical being. And it is more than the civil engineer. It is also the auditor. The inspector. Even the manager making sure they are all working together.

Whoever built the old bridges in my city is lost to history. There was probably no regulation then, and yet, they haven't collapsed.

That's survivorship bias. The ones that didn't collapse are still there. You don't know about the ones that did collapse because they aren't there to see.

You have quite a dim view of humanity if you believe the only reason a bridge stays up or boat floats is due to engineers being anointed and threatened by some entity.

It's true that lives hang in the balance in those forms of engineering, but there are a lot of forms of engineering that are low-stakes, like mechanical engineering of HVAC systems in an office, or audio engineering of a musical recording, where the stakes are not far off from that of writing software, or materials engineering of new stretch fabrics.

Whenever this question of engineering comes up it's always bridges, airplanes, and so on, but that's such a tiny percentage of engineering. Things don't have to be high-stakes to be engineering.

It does however give it better control, a fixed threshold in terms of training that applicants should pass, and more oversight.

Those are the important parts, being real or not is irrelevant. Snake-oil selling is also a very real profession.

Truth to be told, Engineering license requirements have a bigger effect in gate keeping the profession and keep supply restricted, much like any other regulated profession. Gate keeping has some benefits, but is easily circumvented by bad actors all the time, such as all the sham degrees that just churn out the bare minimum to pass licensing tests.

If all the licensing to architects, doctors, engineers, lawyers, and so on, really had a big impact on quality, the world we live in would be very different and better. But that doesn't happen because licensing a profession only works if quality is upheld on all steps of the professional education chain.

A lot of software companies circumvent all of these downsides of bad quality in education by raising the bar on the hiring pipeline with a bunch of tests and so on. Does it always work? No, just like licensing doesn't. But at least it keep la the profession accessible to those who are willing to study algorithms, data structures and so on.

There's no perfect system in our world, but I am glad we don't have license requirements to develop software. I am a statistician that became a dev through self studying, training and learning on the job, and I also know many others (even real engineers) that turned to this profession without graduating in the field and contribute a ton with their specific background knowledge.

Should everyone be called engineers? Probably not as it will elude to licensing the profession, but not calling yourself one decreases chances of finding another job dramatically.

A true tragedy tbh, I'd rather if everyone called themselves devs, scientists or something less loaded than engineer.

>Gate keeping has some benefits, but is easily circumvented by bad actors all the time, such as all the sham degrees that just churn out the bare minimum to pass licensing tests.

Depends on the country and the educational system. In some countries no such sham degree is possible to be accepted for an engineering title.

I have yet to see a country where licensing equates to high quality in all the services. The examples I've used might not work in some places, but people find flaws in licensing systems all the time.

Sometimes licensing is so strict that things get done anyways ignoring license requirements because there is way more demand for some services than the supply of licensed professionals. In such cases, there are so many people violating regulation that policing becomes ineffective. It's the case with some Latin American countries.

And then you get to the problem that the license is ineffective and doesn't add to anything.

There's no perfect system to uphold quality of labor across a profession, we pick our poison and deal with it.

Good points. OP is arguing for regulations. Regulations failed egregiously all over in the Turkey earthquake and illustrate that they are not a silver bullet.

Setting a minimum threshold for competence makes sense, but when it becomes encoded into a legal system the result frequently becomes a way to enrich incumbents.

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