alt Hacker NewsSoftware engineering is looking more and more like it needs a professional body in each country, and accreditation and standards. Ie it needs to grow up and become like every other strand of engineering.
Gone should be the days of “I taught myself so now I can [design software in a professional setting / design a bridge in a professional setting].” I’m not advocating gatekeeping - if you want to build a small bridge at the end of your garden for personal use, go for it. If you want to build a bridge in your local town over a river, you’re gonna need professional accreditation. Same should be true for software engineering now.
Replies
I agree with that and stand by these words. If people want to call it gatekeeping, so be it. Programming, software engineering if you will, is a serious discipline, and this craze needs to stop. Software building should be regulated and properly accredited as any serious activity.
I think the problem is that the person described had no idea what they were doing even in their own professional capacity. They needed to know about patient data management, but they didn't.
The way I see it, if they didn't even realize that they are doing something they shouldn't, they wouldn't have even known they need accreditation, even if that was required. Unless we restricted access to gazillions of tools without it of course.
I think it'll work itself out over time as what AI is/isn't and what data privacy means is discussed more. I'd leave accreditation entirely out of it, because we cannot even agree on what are the actual best practices or if they matter.
Professional bodies act as nothing more then gatekeepers and rent seekers for things of this nature. Anyone can write software, but not everyone writes security minded software.
We already have laws in place, and certifications that help someone understand if a given organization adheres to given standards. We can argue over their validity, efficacy, or value.
The infrastructure, laws, and framework exist for this. More regulation and beaurocracy doesn't help when current state isn't enforced.
There are already laws and standards in almost every country. In this particular example, the people completely ignored all the privacy and data protection laws.
> Software engineering is looking more and more like it needs a professional body in each country, and accreditation and standards.
I mean, people could voluntarily try to create rules of thumb they think are valuable and could try to popularize them
I don't think that requires further restrictive actions
Regulations are written in blood and it will take a bit for vibe coding to cause enough problems.
>> Software engineering is looking more and more like it needs a professional body in each country, and accreditation and standards.
Doesn't help much, accounting needs accreditation and standards, but that doesn't prevent competition level of some 100 accountants per job. Only way you prevent that is by limiting numbers, like lawyers do, case when connections and nepotism matter, you basically get a hereditary aristocratic caste.
I guess we better get used to going back being peasants working shit jobs barely above starvation since that's what the future of capitalism seems to bring: https://realityraiders.com/fringewalker/irreverent-humor/mon...
As the sibling pointed out, there are already plenty of laws about, for example, handling of personally identifiable data. Somehow there is a lack of awareness, perhaps what is needed is a couple of high-profile convictions (which can't be too far off).