The day computing becomes subject to professional licensure is the day the field of computing will fall into hopeless stagnation, just like every other such field.
That's super broad and I think there are complex reasons why each of these has failed, but it's pretty clear that stagnation hasn't helped and has probably actively caused harm by letting incompetence become too common in these areas.
The US has lots of infrastructure that needs repair or replacement, but there are very few areas that do not have clean water, or reliable electricity (Sans extreme weather which causes disruptions in every country), and roads and bridges are all safe to drive on (when was the last time you read about a bridge that collapsed from lack of maintenance?)
The US has its issues, but it does actually have a huge amount of superb, world class infrastructure.
2022.
Freezing temperatures do not cause widespread outages in properly-run countries.
>roads and bridges are all safe to drive on (when was the last time you read about a bridge that collapsed from lack of maintenance?)
2022, when the President was in town in Pittsburg and the bridge there collapsed.
Strongly agree that fewer changes equals fewer bugs, it just comes down to trading that off with shipping value in your product.
Civil and mechanical engineering are not static fields. They come up with new materials, new methods, new ideas. They have tooling to understand the impact of a proposed change and standard ways to test and validate things. It is much easier to predict how long it will take to both design and build things. These are all good things.
We would all benefit from fewer cryptoAI startups and frameworks of the week and more robust toolchains tested and evolved over decades.
Tell me about all the on time and under budget civil/mechanical engineering projects that are happening.
Do you think that just because they have physics to lean on that they can just like press solve and have accurate estimates spit out?
Edit: I totally agree that more long-lived battle tested software toolchains and libraries would be great though
You do not need a credential to work on EV charging infrastructure, rockets, crew capsules to ferry astronauts to the ISS, or many, many other things.
That's how you know, because those fields are not less safe. It's an easy comparison.
Could you expand on that? Are you saying that you don’t need a licensed electrician to connect a new EV charging terminal at installation time?
I am talking about engineers who design the EV charging terminal.
While this is true for some engineering fields it's mostly not true and I think that's a good thing because credentialism is bad actually.
Also, architects are not even engineers.
If I want someone to do work, I want them to be licensed/certified. If they are flagrantly unsafe, I want a licensing board or similar to be able to strip that person of their ability to practice that profession. This raises public perception of the profession as a while, avoids a market for lemons, and gives some baseline.
There are too many decisions in life to be able to spend an hour (or more) researching every option. Credentials allow a framework of trust - I don't have to decide if I trust every single engineer; if they have passed their PE exam and not had their certification taken away that is a starting point.
You're just arguing that you want to outsource your own decision making. You actually should interview your candidates before hiring them, whatever credential they have, because it actually is your job to ensure you work with high quality individuals.
Credentialism basically allows the sort of low effort that you're describing and causes many places to rely solely on the credentials, which are obviously never sufficient to find high quality individuals.
What are the jobs you're day dreaming about that require PE exams? I'd bet that requirement is much less common than you think.
So, how complex is software production? I’d say that there are seldom best practises but often good practices (in example DDD, clean code and the testing pyramid) on the technical side. And then a lot of exploration on the business side (iterative development).
So is a certificate of value? Maybe if you do Wordpress templates but not when you push the boundary of LLMs. And there’s a gray zone in between.
Credentials are insufficient for all of those. A credentialed plumber or electrician could flood or burn down your house and it might be hard to figure out the root-cause, so the credential slips. You still have to do due diligence to find competent people.
I'll admit that for certain things which are easy enough that you can write down procedures for them that a credential can be valuable, but there are a reasonably small number of those things in the world and even when you do write the procedures down you're usually significantly constraining the type of project that individuals in that field can undertake. That constraining is a very important trade-off to consider when thinking about whether a credential is helpful.
Sounds like unfortunate companies to go to.
> much less teach them about it on the job
That is literally how and where people learn the job pretty much everywhere.
> it needs to be up to date
Yeah, it will never be.
> we need to prove people have actually read it and understood it
Why/how?
> Yeah, it will never be.
And this particular document will never be up to date. SWEBOK gets updated on the order of every 5-10 years, so it's always going to be dated. This is one reason it's a poor document for its purpose. If they want it to be relevant it needs to be continuously developed and updated. Hire active editors for the different "knowledge areas" (consider even losing that notion, it's very CMMI which is not something to aspire to) and solicit contributions from practitioners to continuously add to, remove from, correct, and amend the different sections. Build out the document they actually want instead of wasting 5-10 years publishing an updated, but still out-of-date, document.
Choosing a dead document or "mostly dead" if we're generous (with a new version every decade) for a body of knowledge that is constantly growing and developing makes no sense. If you want to publish it as a PDF that's ok, but it needs continuous updates, not decadal updates.
In 2014 Agile barely got a passing mention in the book, 13 years after the term had come into existence and a decade after it had already made major waves in software engineering (many of the concepts that fell under Agile were also already published in the 1990s or earlier and barely mentioned or not mentioned). OOP gets a more substantive section in the 2024 version than the 2014 version when OOP languages had been out for decades before the 2014 one was published. In their added chapter on security they don't even have references for any of section 6.
All of these are things that can be addressed by making it a living document. Update it more regularly so it's actually relevant instead of catching up on ideas from 2009 in 2024 (DevOps as a term dates at least back that far) or ideas from the 1960s and 1970s (OOP) in 2024.
Practitioners are better off reading Wikipedia than this document. It's more comprehensive, more up to date, and has more references they can use to follow up on topics than this book does.
As the document says, it is _not_ the body of knowledge. It is a guide to the body of knowledge. The body of knowledge exists elsewhere, in the published literature.
As I pointed out before: It took over 20 years for them to add a section on security. That was a critical issue when it first came out, an even bigger issue in the 2010s when v3 came out, and they only now got around to it. And that chapter lacks references for an entire section. That is not a good guide.
Make it a living document and keep it continuously updated with either expanded or deepened coverage, kept up to date with what's been learned in the industry. Then it will be useful. Otherwise, just go to Wikipedia and you'll get a better resource.
But this particular work is really, really, really awful. For reasons that are well documented.
In the most fundamental sense, the IEEE doesn't understand what professional SWEs need, in appropriate portions. It confuses SWE with PM, badly. And it has done so, historically. To the point of wide condemnation.
It isn't possible to be a competent engineer, beyond the most junior levels, without having a pretty solid grasp of project management. You might not need to be a good project manager but in order to make competent engineering decisions you have to understand how your tasks fit into the whole.
That is widely understood as the senior+ swe mantra.
The SWEBOK, on the contrary, asserts "it does not depend" and that in a sense is the core problem.
For a detailed takedown, the ACM's is the most famous, there are others that v3 sparked. I'm sure v4 is sparking it's own detailed analysis ... I'm bowing out to go do my day job now. :)
As its Introduction clearly explains, the SWEBOK is primarily a work of political advocacy. One of its political goals is a particular division of labor in software that has been tried, has failed, and has largely been abandoned, as I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41918800. It also advocates basing that division of labor on a form of credentialism which has also been tried in software and continues to fail, as I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41931336.
As explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41907822, the ACM canceled their involvement in the SWEBOK effort in part because they are opposed to this political program, leaving it entirely in the hands of the IEEE. Unfortunately, today's IEEE seemingly lacks the technical competence at an organizational level to avoid publishing utter nonsense through many channels. (Many IEEE members are of course highly knowledgeable, but evidently they aren't the ones in charge.)
As a result, the substantive content of the SWEBOK is also riddled with astoundingly incompetent errors; I dissected a representative paragraph in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41915939, finding 12 serious factual errors in 86 words. As is commonly the case with text written with no concern for veracity, it takes roughly 20 times as much text to correct the errors as it did to make them.
The content of the SWEBOK that actually concerns the engineering of software is not just as error-riddled as the rest of it, but also very limited†, displaced by project-management information, as I showed with a random sampling in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41916612. This focus would represent a major departure from accredited curricula in real engineering‡ fields such as mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, and electrical engineering, as I showed by surveying top university curricula in those fields in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41918011. The SWEBOK represents an attempt to substitute management process for technical knowledge, an approach which is well known not to work. This is what Dijkstra was criticizing about the so-called "software engineering" field 35 years ago in EWD1036, which I linked from the third comment of mine linked above.
(Unlike Dijkstra, I do not think that it is futile to apply an engineering approach to software, but that is not what studying project management is.)
Even within the scope of project management knowledge, the SWEBOK primarily advocates the kinds of management approaches that work well in industries such as mining and civil engineering. However, as I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41914610, fundamental differences between those fields and the engineering of software make those management approaches a recipe for failure in software, even with ample engineering competence.
Engineering is a craft based on science, using formalized theory to navigate tradeoffs to solve problems despite great intellectual difficulty. But, as I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41914332, our current formal theory of software is not strong enough to provide much help with that task. That does not mean that teaching people how to engineer software is hopeless; in that comment I outlined a general approach, and in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41918787 I give more details about the specific things people engineering software need to know, which has relatively little overlap with the SWEBOK. This current state of theoretical knowledge means that you cannot meaningfully assess software engineers' competence by testing their mastery of formal theory, because the formal theory we have is only somewhat relevant to actually engineering software. Instead, you must observe them attempting to engineer some software. That is why credentialism is so especially counterproductive in this field. That would still be a fatal flaw in the SWEBOK even if its content were primarily focused on the actual engineering of software rather than project management.
As I said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41914444, the health-care equivalent of the approach advocated by the SWEBOK is faith healing; the agricultural equivalent of the approach advocated by the SWEBOK was the Great Leap Forward; and the petroleum-exploration equivalent of the approach advocated by the SWEBOK is dowsing.
______
† "The food here is terrible! And such small portions!"
‡ The engineering of software is real engineering, as Hillel Wayne convincingly demonstrated in https://www.hillelwayne.com/talks/crossover-project/, but this is still a controversial point. So I picked three fields which I hope everyone can agree are real engineering. The "software engineering" that the SWEBOK is about, and that Dijkstra was criticizing, is not the engineering of software and is not in fact engineering at all.
Historically I have tended to learn about a new field WAY too much before I tried to hire people in these fields. The truth is, that makes it hard to hire people (but for good reason - depending on your needs, you need to pass on a lot of people). More recently I have tried to pay very close attention to how people do their work (about whose field I am building an interest). The sad reality of the world is that most people and businesses stay in business entirely through dumb luck and because the world is not usually THAT demanding. And if you have a specific requirement, they won't be able to help "out of the box".
You are imagining this competence. It doesn't exist in most people.
And to compound this, to me, the characteristic of an engineer is that they are capable of learning about a specialty discipline. If you hire an engineer and they are incapable of learning something that's needed in your project, THAT is where their problem is (and yours for not hiring to that.) Engineering is not a trade. Certifications are usually about selling them or gatekeeping. I wish it were possible to certify "engineering progress mindset" - no, it doesn't have an ISO number.
But I am also aware what the lack of it does. It leads to buildings falling down or burning up [with people in them]. This was a common occurrence 100+ years ago. You know what made it less common? Standardization. Building codes. Minimum standards for engineers and the trades. Independent studies have all concluded that real world outcomes improved across the board because of these things.
No formal certification or standard will lead to perfection. That is obvious. But what is also obvious, from actually looking at outcomes before and after their introduction, is that having them leads to better outcomes.
You have to stop thinking about individual engineers, and start thinking about the much, much larger picture. What changes will have a positive effect on the larger picture? You can only have an effect on the larger picture if you enforce a change across the board, and then look at the aggregate results.
That can not happen without a mechanism to enforce the change. We can't pray our way to better results, or just sit around hoping people magically get better at their jobs, because that clearly has not happened for the last few decades that I've been working.
The more we depend on technology, the more we see the failures of a lack of rigor. Probably every single person with an address and social security number in the United States has had their personal information leaked, multiple times over, by now. Lives are ruined by systems that do not take into consideration the consequences of a lack of safety, or the bias of its creators. Entire global transportation systems are shut down because nobody added basic tests or fail-safes to critical software infrastructure.
This shit isn't rocket science, man. It was all preventable. And just like with building codes, standards, licenses, etc, we can put things in place to actually teach people the right way to do things, and actually check for the preventable things, by law. If we don't, it's going to keep happening, and keep happening, and keep happening, and keep happening, forever.
We can do something to stop it. But we have to pound our fist on the desk and say, enough is enough. We have to put something imperfect in place to stem the tide of enshittification. Because there are consequences if we don't.
We have seen some of them globally in the form of warfare, but nothing compared to the devastation when the gloves come off. We have not yet seen an entire country's hacker resources attack the water, power, sanitation, food, and other systems of its enemy, all at once. But it's going to happen. And it's going to be devastating. Millions of people are going to die because some asshole set a default password on some SCADA systems. But it should have been impossible, because no SCADA system should be allowed to be sold with default passwords. That's the kind of thing we can prevent, just like you can't build a building today without a fire exit.
That's the really big obvious impact. The impact nobody sees are from tiny decisions all the time, that slowly affect a few people at a time, but on the scale of millions of businesses and billions of people, add up to really big effects. We can make a huge difference here too, which will only be visible in aggregate later on. Like public sanitation, clean water, or hand-washing with soap, nobody thinks about the dramatic effect on public health and longevity until it's clear after decades what kind of impact it made. Technology is everywhere, in every home, affecting every life. The more we improve it [as a standard], the more we will see huge positive impacts later.
To me, this is a more interesting comparison. Is it PE certification and contractor licenses that led to this or is it building codes, construction inspectors, occupancy permits? I will argue that it's inspectors, NOT PE or contractors. And I will argue that the buildings codes have major negative consequences also. We all know of constructions methods that would have great benefits but have to be abandonned because they don't easily fit the current code. We all know of buildings that are to-code and yet ridiculously noisy and cheaply built.
I will also argue that there are building code equivalents already in software and system architecture. There are several for "certifying" system or site security and systems that host credit card payments. And we all know how well they work. So I agree with you that there is room for progress there, but I will also argue that the approach NEEDS to be different. The current security or payment checklists are bureaucratic, CYA nonsense which discourage thinking and encourage bureaucracy and CYA specifically in place of actual security.
There may be a way to specify practices and security but we sure have not discovered it yet. So, a research question rather than already a standardization question? I will point out also that there WERE directions that did work in the past. For example, Dan Farmer and Wietse Venema's SATAN (and the several descendants since then) was bureaucracy-free: the test showed specific rubber-meets-the-road issues with your system that you could either fix or defend. No bullshit about using a firewall(tm) "because that's best practice".
I also don't say that it's bad to publish books. I will say that it is bad to push "best practice". "Best practice" is precisely bureaucracy and CYA in place of thinking. To the point of site owners defending they lapses in the name of "best practices".
You remind me, there is an industry that has some basic software building codes: the Defense Industry. There are some pretty thorough standards for IT components, processes, etc needed to work with the military (even in the cloud). But it is all self-attested, so it's like asking a building contractor to make sure they inspect themselves. Government keeps asking the tech industry to solve this, but nobody wants to take responsibility. As more and more stuff falls apart (in the public & private sector) the government is gonna get louder and louder about this. It's already started with privacy & competition, but big failures like Crowdstrike make it obvious that the rot goes deeper.
> Despite spending more money than ever on defense, our military technology stays the same. There is more AI in a Tesla than in any U.S. military vehicle; better computer vision in your Snapchat app than in any system the Department of Defense owns; and, until 2019, the United States' nuclear arsenal operated off floppy disks. (...) today, in almost every wargame the United States Department of Defense models against China, China wins.
Of course the DoD's problems go much deeper than just credentialism, but credentialism is definitely one of the causes of the disease, not a palliative measure.
100%
The failures you're talking about with SCADA and security breeches will not be solved by some licensing where you check a box saying "thou shall not use default passwords", they'll be solved by holding companies responsible for these failures and having good safety/security requirements. A class isn't going to fix any of that. It's a ridiculous notion.
I get that it's possible to build working software without a certificate, in much the same way as someone can do their own electrics. But is it up to standard and safe for the next guy to work on? This is why we have standards.
...
> That's not how engineering should work. If I hire an architect, I shouldn't have to quiz them to find out if they understand Young's Modulus
Why do you feel strongly about it? Why isn't that how software engineering should work?
While I don't disagree with your belief that improved software engineering skill foundations would be better for the industry as a whole, I find your conclusion unpersuasive because it seems to imply that "something is better than nothing." But as this sibling comments alludes to (an ACM rebuttal to SWEBOK):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41907822
https://web.archive.org/web/20000815071233/http://www.acm.or...
I find the ACM's argument more persuasive:
```
The SWEBOK effort uses the notion of “generally accepted knowledge” as a cornerstone, specifically excluding “practices used only for specific types of software.” We believe very strongly that, for software, this is approach is highly likely to fail and that the opposite approach — primarily focusing on specific domains — is far more likely to succeed. The central reason is that software engineering addresses a much broader scope than traditional engineering disciplines. ...
```
And I tend to agree with their conclusion:
```
Overall, our assessment has led us to the conclusion that the SWEBOK effort is geared aggressively towards trying to define an overall level of professional practice for all of software engineering that would implicitly provide assurances to the public. Furthermore, we believe strongly that it will fail to lead to an achievable level of professional practice in a reasonable time and that, in failing, it may lead to a situation in which the public is provided with false assurances of the quality of software systems ...
```
To conclude, I'll address a point you raised which I have a hunch could be the root premise of your argument:
> Every company I go to, the base of knowledge of all the engineers is a complete crapshoot. Most of them lack fundamental knowledge...
If this is what you've seen at every company you go to, it could be that the common thread is you. I've worked at a variety of companies over my career, and quite a few suffered from the issue you mention. But on the whole, at least half of them (and by proxy, the engineers and engineering orgs I've worked in) have been the exact opposite. The technical bar is very high, the body of knowledge is established, clearly defined, and rigorously enforced; in doing so, these organizations were able to ship durable, high quality code with high velocity and a low defect rate even as the business expanded dramatically and we experienced setbacks and false starts. While I don't think my experience is universal, I also don't think it's unique either.
My unsolicited advice to you would be to try and find a company that has the technical bar you would like to see and work there for a while. Failure is a much poorer teacher than success. There is certainly room for software engineering to evolve as a practice, but for the aforementioned reasons (articulated by folks in far greater, well thought through detail than I have), I don't believe SWEBOK holds the keys.
Every company I go to, the base of knowledge of all the engineers is a complete crapshoot. Most of them lack fundamental knowledge about software engineering. And they all lack fundamental knowledge about the processes used to do the work.
That's not how engineering should work. If I hire an architect, I shouldn't have to quiz them to find out if they understand Young's Modulus, much less teach them about it on the job. But that's completely normal in software engineering today, because nobody is expected to have already learned a universal body of knowledge.
I get this thing isn't perfect. But not being perfect isn't a rational argument for not having one at all. And we certainly need to hold people accountable to have learned it before we give them a job. We need a body of knowledge, it needs to be up to date and relevant, and we need to prove people have actually read it and understood it. If this isn't it, fine, but we still need one.
(this is, by the way, kind of the whole fucking point of a trade school and professional licensing... why the fuck we don't have one for software engineers/IT, boggles my fucking mind, if this is supposed to be the future of work)