It's difficult to interpret your comment. It's a link to a news story about how a partly built "illegal" stone bridge collapsed, killing 11 people, presumably because it was poorly designed. In context, you seem to be suggesting that Linux, QEMU, and ffmpeg are analogous to that bridge because they are of extremely poor quality, while there's some kind of official government software licensing body that protects people from such terrible software. Is that what you meant?
I think that if we want to enable the Fabrice Bellard of civil engineering to build bridges, we probably need to keep all humans at a safe distance from the bridge until it's fully complete, then stress-test it to validate the FEM model before opening it to traffic. Also, probably not build it out of brittle materials like stone, because the stress test wouldn't give you enough information to validate the model's failure predictions.
We should be thinking about how to make civil engineering more like software engineering, with rigorous version control, automated testing, automated builds, rapid improvement in the state of the art, and safety features that minimize risk to humans in case of failure. Not vice versa.
(Though it would be nice if more programmers were in the habit of planning ahead and thinking about failure modes.)
It's an unserious comment responding to an unserious discussion. You've provided a bevy of historical knowledge, which while interesting, in no way resembles what software engineering licensing would be like in the present day. For one thing, corporate power is so entrenched and regulatory bodies so enervated in this space (as everywhere), there is absolutely no possible way the licensure dystopia you've so vividly conjured could exist. And nobody on this forum calling for licensing is asking for some onerous top-down governmental bureaucratic licensing regime, so you've basically created a neat '90s cyberpunk retrofuturistic setting that has little to no relevance to the discussion at hand.
If anything, people are calling for industry standards, something akin to craftsmen guilds of olde, overseen by an existing professional association of engineers such as the ACM or the IEEE [0]. Alternatively, perhaps it could arise as the end result of Triplebyte or some other private solution trying to be the Collegeboard of this industry. Speaking of which, academic exams such as the SAT, the ACT, or AP tests have no legal binding, but most higher academic institutions (until recently) choose to use them as standards. So it's more of a widely-subscribed informal standard.
In practice, such a license wouldn't hold too much water anyway, certainly FAANG would ignore it for the most part in favor of their higher standards, but perhaps it could at least be a Leetcode replacement for smaller firms [1]. That would save both applicants time in having to run the LC gauntlet over and over again and every single company they interview with, and help those smaller companies avoid their hiring woes of cargo-culting FAANG interview practices and accidentally filtering out every applicant along the way. None of this would forbid the practice of programming by non-accredited practitioners, as the licensing regime bogeyman you fear would have absolutely no teeth for enforcement.
Finally, if formalizing the engineering nature of software engineers means that American engineers can be like their Canadian counterparts and wear iron rings [2] to mark their achievement and profession, then that is infinitely more cool than the status quo and more compelling than any number of fantasy dystopias, or evocations of the state of the art of '70s computing, or Operation Sundevil, or the goings-ons in... Iran.
> We should be thinking about how to make civil engineering more like software engineering, with rigorous version control, automated testing, automated builds, rapid improvement in the state of the art, and safety features that minimize risk to humans in case of failure. Not vice versa.
Have you seen the state of software engineering? I'm not sure if this field is in any state to be acting smarter-than-thou towards other engineering disciplines.
> If anything, people are calling for industry standards
Industry certifications do exist. They just haven't been very successful so far. Perhaps we're going to see more focus on them if the pace of development and disruption slows down, but as it is I don't think there's much interest in them.
Not only could it save us time on job interviews, it could save us time on tech support calls: https://xkcd.com/806/
I think you're being unrealistically conservative about how much things are going to change. You might be right that things will get better instead of worse, but overall I think you're seriously underestimating just how much and how fast the world changes over time. Don't forget that it's only been 21 years since "Know Your Customer" was an unthinkable Big-Brother sort of idea, only a year since "vaccine passports" were widely thought to be a paranoid fantasy that could only happen in Israel, and only two weeks since Russia invading Ukraine was widely dismissed as implausible.
More broadly, I think that if you want to know what's going to happen 50 years in the future, you need to look at things that have happened at least 50 years into the past. 02072 will probably be as strange to us, if we live to see it, as our life today would have seemed in 01972.
I'm not sure why you're dismissing Iran. 85 million people live there and their welfare is important.
As for "smarter-than-thou", I think it's rather that good programmers are acutely aware of the severe limits on human mental capacity and therefore look for solutions that don't require them to be infallible or even smart. Also, we have computers, so we can build our practices around them!
A couple of years ago, Hillel Wayne interviewed a number of "crossover" engineers who had worked both as software engineers and in other engineering fields, and my recommendations above are strongly influenced by what they said about what the different fields can learn from one another. If you're interested in these issues, you might be interested in reading his writeup: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/what-we-can-learn/
Actually, if you had wanted to debunk my proposal, this classic would've be the one to do it: https://xkcd.com/927/
> I think you're being unrealistically conservative about how much things are going to change.
They will change, but the direction you are invoking is fundamentally in the opposite course of history wrt this industry. When has there been greater government control over the software industry, specifically when it comes to what constitutes a software engineer?
> You might be right that things will get better instead of worse
I said corporate control is rampant and regulators are as weak as ever. I supposed from a certain political point of view things are getting better.
> only two weeks since Russia invading Ukraine was widely dismissed as implausible
The Orange Revolution happened in 2005. I'm sure technothriller novelists and wargamers have at least been considering the current scenario since then.
> I'm not sure why you're dismissing Iran. 85 million people live there and their welfare is important.
Because this entire discussion has been mostly about Silicon Valley-adjacent engineering. Perhaps Leetcode interviews are a pain point for Iranian programmers. But if you're bringing up government tyranny in civil rights in one area to dismiss a licensure scheme - or more accurately, certification [0] is just plain ol' motte-and-bailey.
> Also, we have computers, so we can build our practices around them!
Computers are only as good as those who write the code, unless we are to start building our practices around the results of neural networks, which is a most intriguing proposal.
That Hillel Wayne article is a good read, but again, I am calling for humility. Because much of the engineering in this industry is far from the lofty bridges and oil rigs the word implies: https://www.karllhughes.com/posts/plumbing
Why would I want to debunk your proposal? I don't think it's bunk, I just think it would have some undesirable consequences. That's no bar to pointing out the desirable ones!
This is the first time Silicon Valley has been brought up in this discussion, but keep in mind that practices in the US are influential around the world, and the harms from strengthening inequality and substituting credentialism for meritocracy fall predominantly on people outside the US. The discussion has mentioned YC (Boston originally), Rust (Mozilla, San Francisco, previously SV), Microsoft (Washington), Android (SV), iPhone (SV), Instagram (SF), the Zetas (Mexico), Brazil (the movie), the American landscape (much of which is in Brazil, the country), Google (SV), FAANG (SV/Washington/SV/SV/SV, but all with offices worldwide), Linus Torvalds as a student (Finland), Fabrice Bellard (France), Guangdong (China), the ACM (US-wide), the IEEE (also), Triplebyte (SV but kind of worldwide), the SAT/ACT/AP tests (US-wide), Ukraine, Russia, and Canada.
