alt Hacker NewsThere’s a reason why many professions have professional bodies and consolidated standards - from medicine to accountancy, actuarial work, civil engineering, aerospace, electronic and electrical engineering, law, surveying, and so many more.
In most of those professions, it is a crime or a civil violation to offer services without the proper qualifications, experience and accreditation from one of the appropriate professional bodies.
We DO NOT have this in software engineering. At all. Anyone can teach themselves a bit of coding and start using it in their professional life.
Analogous to law, you can draft a contract by yourself, but if it goes wrong you have a major headache. You cannot, however, offer services as a solicitor without proper qualifications and accreditation (at least in the UK). Yet in software engineering, not only can we teach ourselves and then write small bits of software for ourselves, we can then offer professional services with no further barriers or steps.
The mishmash of laws we have around data and privacy are not professional standards, nor are they accreditation. We don’t have the framework or laws around this. And I am not aware of the USA (federal level) or Europe (or member states) or China or Russia or India or etc having this.
For example, the BCS in the UK is so weak that although it exists, exceedingly few professional software engineers are even registered with them. They have no teeth. There’s no laws covering any of this stuff. Just good-ol’ GDPR and some sector-specific laws here and there trying to keep people mildly safe.
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> There’s a reason why many professions have professional bodies and consolidated standards
imo this is sold as "keeping people safe" but in practice it's really a gatekeeping grift that increases friction and prevents growth
> There’s a reason why many professions have professional bodies and consolidated standards - from medicine to accountancy, actuarial work, civil engineering, aerospace, electronic and electrical engineering, law, surveying, and so many more.
Professional bodies = gatekeeping. The existence of the body means that the thing its surrounding will be barred from others to enter.
It means financial barriers & "X years of experience required" that actual programmers rightfully decry.
Caveat: When it comes to anything that will affect physical reality, & therefore the physical safety of others, the standards & accreditations then become necessary.
NOTE ON CAVEAT: Whilst *most* software will fall under this caveat, NOT ALL WILL. (See single-player offline video games)
To create a blanket judgement for this domain is to invite the death of the hobbyist. And you, EdNutting, may get your wish, since Google's locking down Android sideloading because they're using your desires for such safety as a scapegoat for further control.
https://keepandroidopen.org/
> We DO NOT have this in software engineering.
THIS IS A GOOD THING. FULLSTOP.
The ability to build your own tools & apps is one of the rightfully-lauded reasons why people should be able to learn about building software, WITHOUT being mandated to go to a physical building to learn.
To wall off the ability for people to learn how computers work is a major part of modern computer illiteracy that people cry & complain about, yet seem to love doing the exact actions that lead to the death of computer competency.