I made a lot of bridges and cranes in my bedroom. They all failed spectacularly but GI Joe didn't seem to mind that the shear strength of a Lego pin was inadequate to support his tank.

The difference is that I don't then promise a municipality that I can build them a bridge that can take their citizens across a river, even in case of a 100 year event. Or an early warning system that can save their citizens from nuclear holocaust. This is the difference in maturity between software "engineering" and real engineering disciplines.

You're free to experiment with your own resources but as soon as you make a promise to the public or your customers you should be required to meet your promises in all circumstances.

This is a fine sentiment, but it's hardly a bright-line rule. We don't criticize Twitter's handling of abuse or fascists because they promised us a platform free of abusive fascists; Twitter didn't promise us shit except 140 character messages. All the problems were emergent.

So many of the great (financial) success stories of our sector are about startups stumbling into an untapped demand, and then running with it for as long as the money lasts. Nobody sets out to build a bridge – they build a 2x4 plank, and then realize that rather a lot of people want to walk on it.

In a sense, software engineering is quite mature. It's probably matured a lot faster than most other engineering branches.

We know about static analysis, fuzzing, unit testing, integration testing, functional testing, Continuous Integration/Deployment/Delivery, etc., etc.

It's just that maturity costs a lot of money. 95% of the software produced just doesn't need that and the client can't even afford it.

Most people also cannot afford to buy cars or houses in one go, yet regulations don't get ignored because of them.

There is almost no way we can compare cars and houses with the average CRUD software, in terms of damage they can do to a person.

More than that, even in the case where damage does happen, most people would rate physical damage higher than non-physical damage, for example monetary loss.

Surely we can, it is all a matter of what CRUD software is managing.

There are institutions that rate what the damage actually means.

> This is the difference in maturity between software "engineering" and real engineering disciplines.

That's a difference between contractors, people, groups, teams, projects, etc. It has nothing to do with the "disciple of engineering" software or otherwise.

I've seen shitty mechanical engineering projects, but hey, it was cheap, so I don't blame the customer! (We're fighting the shit someone churned out from the software side.)

No one expects to go to a mechanical engineer and ask for a new car, 4 wheels, blue color, 200 horsepower, and a week later "could you just make it 8 wheeled, thanks" and a week later "could you also make it so it'll be fast even when run on a mix of vomit and vodka", and so on, yet it's the norm in software.

And we somehow compare it to bridges, because a lot of software is "critical infrastructure".

Put the two together, and it's no surprise it seems that software engineering is not mature enough.

It simply means some kid (or a team of expensive consultants), who knew nothing about long term risks of the combination of attention fatigue and shitty UX, said yes. Lowest bidder and all that too. Or because this was mission critical it never occurred to the procurers that a UX guy/gal should look at it.

I think you're totally right about this but I also think it still speaks to the maturity of the industry and discipline of software engineering. We still have a lot of lessons to learn about building software, even in the cases where it is bid out like a bridge or built like an airplane. We just don't have as much experience under our belt. It's an oversimplification to say that software engineering is immature but I don't think it's wrong. I also don't think the current state of software engineering is even a bad thing or behind in any way, I just like to think we have a lot more to learn.

Who is we though?

I mean the problem in other fields were solved by a brutal trade off toward a draconian prohibition. You can't practice medicine/law/civil-engineering without a license in a lot of states/countries.

But of course you can give CPR, you can help your relatives sort out their pills. You can talk about laws/statutes/regulations with anyone.

So where would we draw the line? Maybe official/public procurement projects must have a process requirement clause, describing good engineering discipline (clear problem statement, analysis of the problem, analysis of aspects by the relevant domain experts [such as UI/UX, security, network, hardware, etc.], general specification, implementation plan with risks identified and testing methodology outlined, used development methodology [SCRUM, KanBan, whatever])?

This doesn't require setting up big and bureaucratic a trade guild, but if something bad happens we can look at the [pre]filed papers and determine who fucked up. The procurers, the experts, or the dev team.

Hmmm, I think it's too early to tell.

After all, we've witnessed move-fast-and-break-things social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit) that had no desire to influence society in a big way get hijacked by state actors to achieve political goals.

We're also witnessing toasters having web servers pre-installed on them with no thought into what happens if the company that pushes patches (if they do at all) goes bankrupt, thus creating vast oceans of botnets that the rest of us now have to deal with.

Again, I think there's a long road ahead of hard lessons when we don't take our own power in software seriously.

In the UK, you can build a bridge without certification as long as you have someone certified review the plans and the implementation before anyone else drives on it. I suspect this is similar for most civilised countries.

A (perhaps short-term) idea would be to make software vendors liable, and do not permit them to sign away that liability.

I completely agree. But the vendor situation looks very different for software.

Imagine being the sole person responsible for migrating Linux from ip/nftables to ebtables. You don't know how your stuff will be used downstream. So you license it with text in all caps reminding people that your software is provided WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. And people still use it to build oil pipelines that bleed toxic goop when sent a really weird keepalive message.

I hope that the first place we see an uptick is security. The list has grown rather long: consumer/citizen identity breaches, hospital ransomware, digital asset theft, remote vehicle control, etc. Most security people I know are of the mindset that systems will be hacked. It's extremely.. pragmatic. You can't really fault the people responsible when many companies simply require good damage control over actual security in order to be successful.

But that's exactly the point. If the consequences were increased, not so many C[I]SOs would be okay with engineers using hot new software every few quarters. And those old boxes running Ruby 1.87 would sure as hell be patched or isolated to oblivion. Companies or projects with good security would flourish. Maybe some would be pressured to operate more like the archetype they're defending against (more red team, more organizational commitment to physical and operational security).

I worked at a security company that had to get rid of a slack bot screen lock game because it hurt some people's feels. So yeah I think some of the priorities in this industry are messed up.

Those people who build oil pipelines should be able to sue whoever sold them the Linux distribution (probably Red Hat or IBM) which was vulnerable to that weird keepalive message.

In that case, a judge (and perhaps a jury) could hear how Red Hat did everything they possibly could to protect from the vulnerability as evidenced by their ISO QA processes and the fact that everyone else was vulnerable to the same "bug" … or from the other side how Microsoft and Apple weren't at-risk, so Red Hat should've caught it.

C[I]SOs would want to be patched, because ISO recommends they would be patched.

> You can't really fault the people responsible when many companies simply require good damage control over actual security in order to be successful.

Which is why I propose legislation, so "good damage control" wouldn't be enough.

You better believe that oil company would want some evidence of testing and proper specifications, and to have them reviewed by a couple independent parties if the government could take them for a percent of gross revenue for the security vulnerabilities alone.

I disagree, unless RedHat certified that the software they're selling is of safety-critical quality. If the oil pipeline company used, let's say, nuts and bolts that didn't meet safety requirements without checking that the parts met the requirements or being assured by the vendor that they did, I would say they're the ones liable and not the vendor.

Maybe it would make more sense for people to be liable for data and not code. There's no need for my cute photo effects mobile app to undergo some kind of exhaustive code review but if I want to store credit card data or social security numbers maybe I should have to pass some kind of review.