Comment on Why is programming.dev federated with exploding heads?
Zalack@startrek.website 9 months agoMy experience has often been the opposite. Programmers will do a lot to avoid the ethical implications of their works being used maliciously and discussions of what responsibility we bear for how our world get used.
It’s why I kind of wish that “engineer” was a regulated title in America like it is in other countries, and getting certified as a programming engineer required some amount of training in programming ethics and standards.
Lucky@programming.dev 9 months ago
How would a formal licensing system work for software engineering? How would they keep up with the rapid evolution in this industry?
I believe in better education in this field, but the standard “engineer” programs from other fields don’t translate to software. Having the government codify today’s standards would stunt the industry as a whole and kill innovation. Imagine if they had done that in the 90s and said all programming must be waterfall, monolithic, relational dbs, and using c/Fortran/Cobol.
Maybe I just don’t understand how other countries handle it though. I know my country would absolutely screw it up
shagie@programming.dev 9 months ago
Its not about knowing the current frameworks available, but rather the “if a civil engineer knowingly designs a bridge that fails there are serious repercussions.”
www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics
As to staying on top of things, every licensed engineer in the US is required by their state’s licensing board to have about a week’s worth of continuing education every year.
njspe.org/…/continuing-education-credits-for-prof…
The thing is that the title of software engineer has been applied to people who lack licensure and thus weakened the importance of the title in terms of expected knowledge and professional responsibility.
As to the NSPE licensing software engineer - nspe.org/…/ncees-ends-software-engineering-pe-exa…
They tried doing it for a few years, though few people were interested in taking the test and so it was dropped. I did look into it, however the strong math and physics requirement for the FE exam (the prerequisite for the PE) went beyond what I took in college.
Zalack@startrek.website 9 months ago
Formal licensing could be about things that are language agnostic like how to properly use tests to guard against regressions, how to handle error states safely.
How do you design programs for critical systems that CANNOT fail, like pace makers. How do you guard against crashes? What sort of redundancy do you need in your software.
How do you best design error messages to tell an operator how to fix the issue, especially in critical systems like a plane, and guard against them doing the wrong thing. I’m thinking of the DreamLiner incidents where the pilots’ natural inclination was try grab the yoke and pull up, but that caused the plane to stall. My understanding was that the error message that triggered during those crashes was also extremely opaque.
When do you have an ethical responsibility not to ship code?
None of that is impacted by what tech stack you are using.
Lastly, under certain circumstances, Civil engineers can be held personally liable for negligence when their bridge fails and people die. If we are going to call ourselves “engineers”, we should bear the same responsibility.