alt Hacker NewsSoftware is an employment rather than a profession. That distinction is important. Here is a definition of profession:
Traditional professions share essential characteristics. They provide a vital service to society, requiring expertise and skill developed through years of training, education, and experience. Professions establish standards of practice and certify that their members are qualified to serve the needs of society.
--US Army, ADP 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession
Software does not have explicit standards of practice or a required body of certifications for its practitioners. Software, as an employment, is whatever an employer wants or is willing to accept at any given moment.
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> US Army, ADP 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession
I'm not going to let the army tell me what my job is.
The IEEE has made some efforts to turn software engineering from an occupation into a profession — on par with civil engineering, architecture, law, medicine, military science, etc. A true profession requires a recognized body of knowledge, formal qualification criteria, and a code of ethics. So far most working software developers haven't shown much interest in this, nor is there much demand from employers or government authorities. I don't think we need to professionalize software engineering in the general case but it is an option for those who want it.
https://www.computer.org/education/bodies-of-knowledge/softw...
Be careful with military definitions. One near-universal aspect of a "profession" is that it be self-regulating. Lawyers have Bar Associations that dictate who can or cannot practice. Doctors have Medical Associations. So too accountants and engineers. These entities are granted monopolies but remain independent from government and set their own standards.
But by that definition, soldiering can never be a "profession" as a soldier is always regulated by the government they serve, and there is no professional association regulating mercenaries. But I would be very hesitant to suggest that the US Marines are not professional soldiers. They are. The definitions are messy.
An easier way to answer this question is: does the profession have a professional society?
Yes, several: the ACS, ACM, IEEE.
So you’re wrong.
What do you find important about this distinction? To me it's a description of the normative relationship between practitioners and broader society but I don't really see the significance you do.
Hillel Wayne wrote a really excellent well researched article about software engineering compared to other forms of engineering a few years ago. It necessarily goes into a lot of this stuff but what emerges is that these definitions are regulatory and historical debris.
You don't need medical board or a bar to certify or constrain professional behavior and those organizations may not constrain as much as you assume anyway. The reasons we do have those institutions is as much a matter of historical accident as any modern need for it, and the reasons we don't have it for other high impact fields is pretty much an accident too.
And in a lot of the world software engineering does have professional certification and standards of practice. They still ship adware and racist loan denial algorithms too.
https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/