> You see this sentiment come up about every few months here. We're not rigorous enough. Or we can't estimate our build time well. Or we don't have any liability. Or we don't have a codified set of morals that govern us. BS.

I don't see the BS. Coming from a traditional engineering discipline, I'd agree with each of those. The scariest to me is on professional standards and ethics: it seems to be an almost point of pride among some HN commenters that they operate outside of any formal standard. That baffles me.

> The scariest to me is on professional standards and ethics

OK. What standards and ethics would you recommend we adhere to?

First, do no harm? One, define harm. If I'm depriving a corporation of money by automating something for consumers, is that harm? How about if I write a clone of netcat, am I liable for its use in nefarious scanning of ports?

Thou shalt not write bugs? That would be awesome, were it possible. I can't think of many developers who wouldn't want to get to this point, assuming of course it didn't result in a 1 month project plan to write a sorting algorithm.

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-...

The IEEE-CS/ACM jointly publish one: http://www.computer.org/web/education/code-of-ethics

It doesn't seem that different from other professional codes.

Hit the nail on the head with this. Engineering started off as rules of thumb and best practice. SE is an emerging field. In 50 - 100 years i think we'll have it down.

Also regular constraints don't apply to software that normally would in construction fields. Gravity and mass and other real constraints are not present in program construction. Time and complexity are massive issues, but imagination and the mental model of a process is the usual barrier. Just think about anything web scale, (google docs?) its impressive for 'meh' engineering.

What will be the incentive of a start up company to follow these new rigorous software engineering practices? How many other engineering disciplines could get away with cutting those types of corners for a first version of a product? Perhaps people put planks over gaps when the standard for bridges was lower. It's hard for me to imagine a world where customers demand a product built with strict software engineering practices. Though, that would be nice if that happened, as a user.

You have a good point about timing. I often bring this up myself. The major fields of engineering have hundreds to thousands of years of work that went into them. They also went in the same direction more. I challenge any architect that mocks our work to build his next house using methods that existed in their first 100 years then live in it.

None have taken me up on the offer.

Great point!