Suffice it to say most SWEs are not being hired to do actual engineering, bc the industry can’t get over the fact that just because you can update and release SW instantly doesn’t mean you should.
The lack of certification means this training isn’t reinforced to the degree it is in engineering.
The other 99.99....% of software engineers will get different titles.
All of this ignores the individuals who are most responsible for these catastrophes.
Investors and executives deliver relentless and effective pressure toward practices that maximize their profits - at the expense of all else.
They purposefully create + nurture a single point of failure and are massively rewarded for the harm that causes (while the consequences are suffered by everyone else). Thanks to the pass they reliably get, we get their leadership design degrading every industry it can.
If their sign off is required, this could work. The question is whether it’s worth it, and if it is, in which contexts.
Civil engineers liability is tied to standards set by gov agencies/depts and industry consortium.
Standards would have to be created in software engineering - along with the associated gov & industry bodies. In civil engineering, those things grew during/from many decades of need.
— Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, 1988. (EWD1036)
Some pieces are more important than others. Those are the bits that need to be carefully regulated, as if they were bridges. But not everything we build has lives on the line.
If that means we don't get to call ourselves "engineers", I'm good with that. We work with bits, not atoms, and we can develop our own new way of handling that.
Neither do I. Neither did Dijkstra. EWD1036, “On the cruelty of really teaching computing science”, is about education reform, to enable those who don't "happen to have just the right mind set" to fully participate in actual, effective programming.
I suspect this particular title-exaggeration is fueling this particular fire.
Going forward, I believe we need to be aware that software controlled mechanics grew out of two disparate disciplines; it presently lacks the holistic thinking that long-integrated industries do.
No individual software developer, nor corporation, is foolish enough to claim their software is free of bugs, that’s why they put the risk on the customer and the customer still signs on the dotted line and accepts the risks anyway. After all, it’s still way more profitable to have the potentially-faulty software than needing an army of clerks with pen and paper instead.
Most software has to be this way or it would be exorbitantly expensive. That’s the bargain between software developers and the companies that buy the software. Customer accepts the risks and gets to pocket the large profits that the software brings (because of the software’s low cost), because it’s better than the software developer balking at the liability, no software being written at all, and having an army of staff every airport writing out boarding passes by hand. There are only a few softwares that aren’t this way - example the software in aircraft or nuclear power plants. That software is correspondingly extremely expensive. Most customers that can, choose to accept the risks so they can have the larger profits.
There is no reason that software couldn't be treated with the same care and respect. The only reason we don't is because the industry resists that sort of change. They want to move fast and break things while still calling themselves "engineers." Almost none of this resembles engineering.