alt Hacker News>The best chemical engineer isn't the one that knows the pressure at which chlorine tanks fail, they are the one that knows chlorine gas can be stored in a garage in coke bottles.
I look forward to the day that software 'engineers' are held accountable to the same degree that all other engineers are.
I've written software for industrial machinery that can kill people if it went wrong. It's amazing how much your views on software change when you realize that your accountability starts at manslaughter and goes up from there.
A human life is valued at around $10m in the developed world, incidentally my first real job was fixing an excel spreadsheet that caused $10m in trade losses after the API it called for exchange rates went stale.
I'm not saying that we arrest everyone who writes a spreadsheet to help them with their job. But _someone_ should have their head on the line when it becomes a business process without oversight that can cause millions in losses, damages or bills.
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I look forward to the day when "good code" becomes as obvious as the best practices in some other engineering disciplines.
I like the Practical Engineering YT channel and one thing I always find interesting is learning about all the research and guidance that exists for things I never thought of. Like there are 400 page documents on how to implement drainage in dams based on decades of experience and post-mortem investigations when things went wrong.
But it feels like every time I'm involved in a software project, we're starting almost from scratch and just incrementing towards an unknown future which is "good enough". Even if you have a team of experienced developers then the Best Practices at the start of the project are not what they were 2 years prior. The tools that they used on their past projects have evolved (or been deprecated). Or maybe they're being asked to do a bunch of data engineering where they previously did full stack Web development, because org structures are fluid and many IT leaders feel that good engineers can solve any problem with code (ignoring the idea of specialisation).
This is not to disagree with your point, but more to say that a lot of the infrastructure and professional norms around classical engineering disciplines just aren't there (yet) for developers.
I am very glad to hear the positive tone of discourse happening under your thread. I've been arguing for regulation for the software "engineering" "profession" for over a decade now, and am usually met with dramatic recoil.
You don't need to write pacemaker firmware to produce severely negative outcomes through ineptitude or indifference. I know of a frontend developer whose UX mistake in a financial mobile app triggered a vulnerable customer to end their life. I've heard stories of people ending up in the hospital because of unmet, unvoiced requirements for tasks delegated to junior developers.
It's a strange world we live in where the "profession" with the most (usually unrealized) potential has no oversight.
Bob Martin said it best: We either regulate ourselves or we will find ourselves regulated.
> chlorine gas can be stored in a garage in coke bottles
I get the point you're trying to make but you absolutely can't store chlorine gas safely in your garage in a coke bottle. If you try doing this as a business, you'll get shut down hard and possibly some prison time too.
On the other hand, WordPress is a valid solution for a huge number of businesses. Perhaps the previous commentor should have labored their point and noted that the engineer's skill is required to know when WordPress is a valid option, and also just as importantly, when it's not.
But suggesting the use of WordPress is in no way comparable to doing something illegal like storing chlorine gas improperly.
A better comparison would be to using an off the shelf chlorine storage system versus developing your own. For most companies, off the shelf will be the right choice, but others are doing complex things that require them to develop their own systems.
I look forward to the day when software engineers have the autonomy that licensed engineers have, so they can tell managers no and if the manager goes around the engineer, the manager and the company end up directly liable for the damage they create.
Developers should get the axe even though there’s an entire process behind pushing code out to production? QA, UAT? Surely people sign off on what’s being pushed out?
I don't think this is gonna happen until we're able to say no to stupid shit pushed on us.
When working as an electrical engineer I never had co-workers fighting me on whether I should do stuff that goes against building code. My building engineering friends never had a product manager say "trust me, we don't need this load bearing wall".
I know of engineers who did stupid shit at work and got their license revoked, and even some famous ones went to jail.
Of course there is the famous Steve Jobs story [1] where he forced Burrell Smith to do a stupid PCB and it didn't work, but Jobs was at least willing to accept that this was a test and would take the fall for the spent money.
[1] https://folklore.org/PC_Board_Esthetics.html