alt Hacker NewsWhat 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.
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I sure as hell don’t want a doctor who hasn’t gone through any kind of certification and approval process.
Coding interviews don't matter anymore.
Every part of your existing job is transforming before your eyes.
If you cling to definitions and static roles, you're going to have a bad time.
If you have ever worked in almost any other industry your first question quickly answers itself. If you have never worked in an industry principally governed by ethical standards it would be challenging for me to describe it to you. I cannot give you what your perspective has never before imagined.