> We're going to need software engineers to be accountable for things we've done and signed off on.

Management first. It's not engineers setting incentives.

This is just passing the buck. If the boss tells you to write credit card stealing software or to DDOS your competitor are you just going to do it? As professionals, we need to push back and refuse when we know our practices are letting critical bugs go to production, just like (I assume) we'd push back if we were asked to build something unethical. And we should be accountable if we don't.

If a civil engineer signs off on a bridge and it collapses during rush hour, he doesn't get to just say, "Whelp, boss rushed me, blame him."

> If a civil engineer signs off on a bridge and it collapses during rush hour, he doesn't get to just say, "Whelp, boss rushed me, blame him."

He doesn't but this is actually a problem. Ideally, he doesn't get to say this because he chose to rush and if he'd said "No" instead then the boss can't do anything about it. In reality, especially in the US, his boss will just fire him and hire somebody else more co-operative and he knows it.

Without a strong, legally supported and well resourced professional organisation behind people with an obligation like this, they will get exploited and then blamed by people who are insulated from the effects.

Do you see such an organisation for software engineers in the United States of America? Or even most of Europe? Because I do not.

I fully agree a strong, organized professional organization for software developers would solve a lot of problems the craft faces. If we had something like the Bar Association or the Medical Board, would we have to keep implementing FizzBuzz and reversing linked lists every interview just to prove a basic level of competence?

Not, but then the "Software Developer Board" would apply those as certification tests instead.

But you'd take the exam once rather than having to do it every few years when you want to change jobs.

> Do you see such an organisation for software engineers in the United States of America? Or even most of Europe? Because I do not.

The problem is that medicine and law move orders of magnitude more slowly than software, at the moment. Software is evolving unbelieveably faster, and its problems are far more diverse. As it settles down, if it ever does, we may be able to calcify roles more formally, and then regulate those roles. But at the moment it's the wild west.

Your example is so decoupled from reality that it's misleading. Most catastrophic problems in large systems aren't "I made a thing and it's buggy," or "I made a thing that steals SSNs." Most of them are some variation of "It used to work this way, but this upstream dependency changed in a way that we are ok with, and now it works a different way, and we have no visibility into what that may change for downstream dependencies, so hopefully they are aware of the same things we are and act accordingly." Bugs can come from many different people signing off on changes that are often, in isolation, fine.

Imagine if all buildings had to constantly be retrofitted to support a new structures on, below, inside of, around, and next to them, and every retrofit had a different engineer/architect/etc. No civil engineer would ever sign off on anything.

Yours is a good example! I have in a past life actually used the "you wouldn't bolt a new floor onto a building" argument successfully to push against feature creep.

I think even a small amount of accountability would definitely start some much-needed conversations at software companies about things like "do we really need to retrofit this thing onto that working thing?" and "do we fully understand our dependencies and the consequence of merging from them?" and software quality would be better for it. If the consequence of a bug is low, go for it--the accountability should be low, too.

EDIT, just to add another example. I remember when I felt rushed and checked in some client code that did not implement exponential backoff for request failures--it just retried. Of course that code made it to production and our customers started DDOSing our server when a brief outage happened. I felt terrible about it and honestly believe I should have been fired for it. Yes, management rushed me, but they're not the ones that wrote the code. They're not the ones that made an amateur-hour error. It was me.

> I felt terrible about it and honestly believe I should have been fired for it. > Yes, management rushed me, but they're not the ones that wrote the code

If you felt so strongly about it, you could have quit. Why wait on management to fire you?

It's fairly easy to blame engineers for everything that goes wrong. Engineering doesn't work in a vacuum, the system and processes have to have guardrails in place that prevent lapses in quality, including security, from reaching the customer. When such guardrails have been systematically dismantled in favour of "improving productivity", the management - which removed the guardrails - becomes the culpable entity.

Interesting. Great that you want to take full responsibility for your work. There is always two sides to a coin though. Strange to me that you scapegoat yourself that hard. Reminds me of the story, where someones error cost the compny millions. He gets called in his superiors office. He says something about resignation. His boss responds: "What? We just invested millions in your education". Every error we still have to make, is a treasure waiting to be dug up IMHO.

> Yours is a good example! I have in a past life actually used the "you wouldn't bolt a new floor onto a building" argument successfully to push against feature creep.

I've seen a few houses built on top of apartment buildings though.

> had to constantly be retrofitted

There’s your problem. You can’t constantly change software contracts without causing bugs. If you’re liable for the code chances are things will slow a bit. Good! We need to develop software slower.

> You can’t constantly change software contracts without causing bugs

You can't write software without causing bugs. Static requirements or not. The software that goes into aid/space-crafts is written this way, and it still breaks occasionally. Sometimes bugs are circumvented with hardware because it's cheaper and more reliable than making the software change.

Buildings have fault tolerances. You can use the wrong amount of something, or put something in the wrong place, and have it still work. If buildings had to be designed and built exactly corrects or they fell apart, we wouldn't have buildings.

> We need to develop software slower

To each his own. Most software is fine having bugs. I'd rather have a modern web browser with a few bugs than have an ascii-only command line browser that works flawlessly. The U.S. economy would agree with me there. The software in your pacemaker or car, sure, balance safety and speed to save the most lives/time, but most software operates in domains with far lower stakes.

> If a civil engineer signs off on a bridge and it collapses during rush hour, he doesn't get to just say, "Whelp, boss rushed me, blame him."

I'm willing to bet that the civil engineer in that case has much better whistle-blowing protections, or at the very least, some comfort that if they get fired and someone else replaces them that's willing to do it... that person will be the unhireable one in the future.

> This is just passing the buck. If the boss tells you to write credit card stealing software or to DDOS your competitor are you just going to do it?

This is already illegal. Holding the makers of things more accountable would do nothing for you in this example.

At a properly licensed engineering firm, the managers are senior engineers who review and sign off.

Keyword being properly. Too many companies push their engineers into people management.

Which is weird. Your best people should remain engineers. Have them indeed sign off on these things.

> Your best people should remain engineers. Have them indeed sign off on these things.

I agree; the problem with an engineer track is that the salary ceiling is too low, and you have to move to management to get higher salary. but then you end up not using your engineering skills, and waste potential.

What needs to happen is a way for people management to be done without a hierarchical structure. Aka, the senior engineer sits not under their manager, but that the manager is subservient.

Joel spolsky have written about this "problem" already in the last couple of decade: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2009/03/09/how-to-be-a-progra...

> To make sure that the debate happens respectfully and on a rational basis of facts, it’s absolutely critical that the program managers and developers be peers. If developers report to the program manager, at some point during the debate the program manager is going to get sick of the whole thing and just say, “OK, enough talking, now we do it my way.”

The salary range in a professional track does not _have_ to be too low. That's a choice, a value judgment, by management. Some companies do things differently. In at least one company I know, the professional track runs parallel to the management track: engineers can earn as much or more than senior managers, architects as much as directors. It's all up to whether the organization really values the services it's independent contributors provide. Sadly, many companies are not only indifferent, but hostile to the whole concept: playing at cost reduction theater and outsourcing to satisfy the avarice of simpleton investors. Bottom line is that tech pros need to take charge of their own futures and avoid the latter kinds of companies like the plague, when they have a choice. People need to make a habit of asking questions about professional compensation structures during interviews.

Indeed. I haven't worked at a company that was managed (partially) by engineers. Sure, there were tech leads, but as soon as it came to product and account management and "up", it was business school. Must be some corollary of Peter's Principle.

I don't think pushing a good engineer to also take on management work is such a bad idea. I've actually had quite a lot of success with that system.

The much worse idea is to promote BAD engineers to full time management positions, which seems to be the way most sub par and mediocre companies do it right now.

The problem is when this is the only path to growth. You basically cap out as Senior Engineer.

Is that an argument for the former or the latter?

I think that the choice should be up to the person. But there almost never is a non-managerial path.

The meme is that great engineers make bad people managers. They can still be engineering managers, and have a business/HR people run the org and try to make underling engineers productive, while the lead engineer is responsible for certifying whatever gets engineered.

I don't think this is black or white. I've found out that brilliant engineers actually can be incredible people managers if you help them develop those soft skills. Sure there is the age old adage that "I am a brilliant engineer just pay me more for my engineering work" but this has two aspects. For one you definitely can do it if your org is big and rich enough. But on the other side, software is a product of people interacting. If your engineering importance rises you still will have to deal with lots if people. So are you really staying purely an engineer then?

What kind of "accountability" do you mean?

Presumably similar to the accountability that applies to PEs. A smaller group of engineers than all engineers sign off on parts of the system, they're assuming a legal responsibility and the penalties for malpractice can go all the way to imprisonment.

Non-licensed engineer are not liable in the same sense, their employers and PEs are. Same thing could apply in software, but people whine too much and it probably won't happen. Every time the topic comes up, people chime in with "But software is different. It's hard." and expect that lame ass excuse to be sufficiently persuasive. Software is also critical, not all, but a lot. Critical systems warrant additional scrutiny and liability.

What aspect of this "acropalypse" bug amounts to malpractice?

An undocumented change to a core system behavior that fundamentally altered how (likely) most applications behaved in an unanticipated (for the users of the system and programmers targeting the system) way. That's malpractice.

Yeah, I don't buy that. Too much Monday-morning quarterbacking.

I'm not against some well-thought-through standards for certain safety-critical applications, but it's got to be a lot better than "maybe code would be better if we threatened to throw engineers in jail for contributing to complex and subtle interdependent bugs that caused a privacy bug that didn't have a significant real-world impact".

> This "aCropalypse" event is an example of how making the wrong triage of an issue report can turn out very expensive. All the costs to the world of aCropalypse could've been averted.

Not trying to be facetious, but... what costs? It is unlikely that this cost the company any substantial amount. It probably wasn't even a whole lot of extra work for the PR department, as the bug didn't generate mainstream headlines.

The unquoted sentence after that was "Some of those costs might eventually come back to the company." Which I distinguish from "costs to the world" in the quoted sentence.

By costs to the world I'm thinking all the things that happen because something a user cropped out was revealed because it wasn't really cropped.

Hypotheticals to illustrate costs to the world:

* A company loses a big business deal because IP/plans leaked to competition in reverted-crop.

* A medical provider and personnel get hit by lawsuit and/or HIPPA for patient data de-anonymized due to reverted-crop of an image.

* Someone gets harassed at their workplace when a reverted-crop adult photo revealed their identity and gets circulated among colleagues.

* Semi-automated extortion rackets, going through troves of images, looking for revertible cropping.

Maybe luck is with us, and not a single instance of harm to the world actually happens. Or maybe there are many such instances of harm to the world.

Regarding costs to the world eventually coming back to a company -- speaking in general, not of this particular situation -- I think that could come in forms including: brand damage, lost business, lawsuits from those harmed, undesirable turns in legislation, regulatory fines, etc.

> the bug didn't generate mainstream headlines

So ... yesterday it turned out that Microsoft had the control over a certain Bing's search results wide open to anyone with an Azure account, and that enabled anyone to get access to and control over the Azure services of everyone that used Bing for these specific searches. There were probably other ways too, but that hasn't been disclosed or investigated. And it is --of course!-- unknown if this attack ever happened in real life: there were no logs.

That's quite the problem, wouldn't you say? Well, did you see mainstream articles? There was only an article in The Reg, which attracted a mere 11 replies. It simply doesn't get attention, probably because it was framed as "a misconfiguration", yet the costs could be staggering.

> We're going to need software engineers to be accountable for things we've done and signed off on.

Only if management is held equally accountable.

I've worked at places with dedicated security teams, that acted as a 'buffer' between management and engineers. Those places tended to take security seriously.

Places -without- those, I noticed that management has a tendency to sweep security issues 'under the rug' since they impact deadlines.

>"We're going to need software engineers to be accountable for things we've done and signed off on."

And see them evaporate from the companies that would implement something like this.

Personally I would neve take a contract where I could be held legally responsible for bugs.

And ultimately it is the owner who let the product out in a wild without spending a year testing billions of permutations first. Try holding them responsible and see how far can you get.

'Hard' engineers do this, though. If you want the label you should take the responsibility as well.

I do not give a shit about a label and have none in a software field. Just MSc in physics. I design and implement products and I have long list of clients happy with my work. This helps me find new contracts. You can call me a shrub if you wish. I still get paid.

> I do not give a shit about a label and have none in a software field. Just MSc in physics. I design and implement products and I have long list of clients happy with my work. This helps me find new contracts. You can call me a shrub if you wish. I still get paid.

Don't bother, the people you are answering to, the "engineers", are concern trolls who want to become gatekeepers that will force you to have an "software engineering license" they control to do your job, that's their ultimate goal, they are corporatists.

Imagine needing a freaking license to deploy an app, Communist China style, These people are cunning and come to every thread where somebody screws up to push their anti free market agenda. Don't waste your energy arguing with them, call them out.

In Europe calling yourself an enginner without having a proper title can send you to jail, because an actual Engineer has civil duties and accountability on civil causalities.

Never heard that term. Who calls themselves a "hard" engineer?

It seems it's a play with soft-ware hard-ware, implying electric and civil engineering.

No one, but there are PEs.

The frivolity with which "Engineer" titles were co-opted by tech has always been distasteful to me. It felt intended to claim all of the prestige with none of the rigor, accountability, or social responsibility.

I want a software PE program so bad. I've done my best to hold myself to the same ethical standards, but if there isn't a legal bite behind negligence, you just get shoved aside.

Unless you work in regulated sector where lives / critical infra literally depends on your code no employer will pay for "PE level ethical standard" development. Too expensive. So your PE will be of very limited value unless you want to prohibit people without PE making a living writing software in general. But if that is what you want my take is - GFY.

> (Hardware) engineers do this, though.

Broadcom exploits over the years would disagree. So would Samsung's hardware encryption. So would TPM. So would BadUSB. So would everything related to Bluetooth. Et cetera.

No matter what kind of engineering you do, don't try to predict the future. Engineer towards ease of maintenance and ease of update/deployment instead.

I don’t think that’s true.

None of the engineers I have hired or worked with assume such liability directly.

Usually, their firms limit liability to the price of the contract. I assume insurance does otherwise.

* * *

What billions of permutations do you need to test when the test had already been done by someone else and brought to your issue tracker on a silver platter?

> And see them evaporate from the companies that would implement something like this.

It might be doable, but would also require (at a minimum) a lot more compensation to make up for the increased liability. Which gets to the heart of the problem, it’s a lot more expensive to produce higher quality software.

Company needs to be liable and introduce necessary steps so that it’s staff operates responsibly.

How quick is a manager at deprioritizing quality to secure a deadline?

I cannot comment on threads older than 2 weeks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10199405

So reply to this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35164665

After cloning astrovim as `~/.config/nvim`, do similar with https://github.com/AstroNvim/user_example but with button "Use this template".

Then in `~/.config/nvim/user/plugins/user.lua` add

``` return { { 'Mofiqul/vscode.nvim', priority = 1000, config = function() --vim.cmd.colorscheme 'vscode' vim.o.background = 'light'

      local c = require('vscode.colors').get_colors()
        require('vscode').setup({
        -- Alternatively set style in setup
        -- style = 'light'

        -- Enable transparent background
        transparent = true,

        -- Enable italic comment
        italic_comments = false,

        -- Disable nvim-tree background color
        disable_nvimtree_bg = true,

        -- Override colors (see ./lua/vscode/colors.lua)
        color_overrides = {
            vscLineNumber = '#FFFFFF',
        },

        -- Override highlight groups (see ./lua/vscode/theme.lua)
        group_overrides = {
            -- this supports the same val table as vim.api.nvim_set_hl
            -- use colors from this colorscheme by requiring vscode.colors!
            Cursor = { fg=c.vscDarkBlue, bg=c.vscLightGreen, bold=true },
        }
    })
    require('vscode').load()
    end,
  },

} ```

and in `~/.config/nvim/lua/user/init.lua`:

``` colorscheme = "vscode", ```

Example here https://github.com/rofrol/AstroNvim--user_example

Thanks

Management earns the big bucks because they are supposed to be accountable. If the expectation is that software engineers should be accountable and not management the money should go to the engineers instead.

When was the last time you've seen any manager being accountable for any defect in software?

This wasn't a matter of the ball being dropped, this is a matter of the epidemic of arrogance in Google.

It's going to keep biting them in the ass. The prick who heads up Golang's security has refused to allow people to control what encryption algorithms are enabled to disabled in Golang's TLS 1.3 implementation (he was one of the designers of the TLS 1.3 spec) because, and I wish I were joking - he feels TLS 1.3's implementation is perfect and nobody would have a reason to, and even if they do, why, they can just wait until google releases the patch to fix it, and then deploy that change.

Because of course that's how production environments work....you can just deploy a new version of the language you're using, instead of, you know, a config file change or a few lines of code.

> We're going to need software engineers to be accountable for things we've done and signed off on.

You start with management and all the way to the top including the CEO and CTO liable for criminal charges.

And, no we're not going to need any of that.

IMO this is another anecdotal proof that so called software “engineering” isn’t, and how uncontrolled over-complexity of modern software is going further out of control.

Software is written, like blogs, novels or laws, not engineered. That’s wrong.

I spent 5 years in nuclear power before going into tech and I have sort of joked that the software engineering the goes into AI, IoT, Phones, Cars, etc, is the next Chernobyl waiting to happen. It's all fun and games till these things get connected directly to lives. I actually find the governance of nuclear power a decent model for managing the risk. You mentioned management needs to be held responsible but management will choose short term profit every day until dealing with negative externalities is forced upon them like it is in nuclear.

Imagine if the toxic waste that is the mental impact of social media, or forever insecure devices littering the Internet, or any number of things was obligated to the companies to do their best to fix it. Nuclear reactors put huge money away so that when they are done they are bulldozed back into a green field (Other than what was supposed to be a solved problem of spent fuel).

Anyways, the likelihood of regulation is nil and a global world means those negative externalities will continue on churning till the world agrees we suck at managing risk. Which is also nil. Mental health crisis and insecure tech just isn't as flashy as nuclear in terms of getting regulated in the interest of public health.

I second this

Risk management (especially with the js people) seems to be "lol what's that?"

Also we have the C cowboys pretending they can manage the complexity of their "simple language" in a complex world

If the C are cowboys I am afraid to ask how the C++ ones would be called...

Well, speaking as a C++ dev, it's quite a hippo rodeo.

This bug has nothing particular to do with C. It's an API design problem ther goes back to weird POSIX choices.

And to be even more honest, why create a similar Api with different behavior?

How many use cases prefer not truncating files?

The worst part is that the API did originally behave like the one it’d originally emulated, before being modified after years of use.

> the issue was deferred without acknowledging the reporter's concise suggestions of how to handle it, engineering-wise

A day in my life at my last job. Basically a regular occurrence that it was “urgent” after a customer report.

> All the costs to the world of aCropalypse could've been averted. Some of those costs might eventually come back to the company.

This is the bigger problem, there will be very little real cost to the company or engineers involved. My guess is that the cost for engineering a fix and blogging it about it falls into the buffer PR spend or security engineering time. If anything the company will learn from this mistakes for a short time and it will actually save them money in the long run.

The vast majority of software used today has very little legal liability. The industry has perfected the art of legal lip service. There is a massive growth at all costs mentality throughout the industry and engineer’s personal pride only goes so far.

If you want to see real change then you need government and the judicial to enforce real legal liability onto software engineers and companies. That would result in real cyber security rather than current wack-a-mole fines or government’s trying to promote or enforce best practices etc.