We’re definitely in a moment. I’ve seen a large shift away from discipline in the field. People don’t seem to care about professionalism or “good work”.
I mean back in the mid teens we had the whole “move fast and break things” motif. I think that quickly morphed into “be agile” because no one actually felt good about breaking things.
We don’t really have any software engineering leaders these days. It would be nice if one stood up and said “stop being awful. Let’s be professionals and earn our money.” Like, let’s create our own oath.
> We don’t really have any software engineering leaders these days. It would be nice if one stood up and said “stop being awful. Let’s be professionals and earn our money.”
I assume you realize that you don't get very far in many companies when you do that. I'm not humble-bragging, but I used to say just this over past 10-15 years even when in senior/leadership positions, and it ended up giving me a reputation of "oh, gedy is difficult", and you get sidelined by more "helpful" junior devs and managers who are willing to sling shit over the wall to please product. It's really not worth it.
It’s a matter of getting a critical mass of people who do that. In other words, changing the general culture. I’m lucky to work at a company that more or less has that culture.
Yeah I’ve found this is largely cultural, and it needs to come from the top.
The best orgs have a gnarly, time-wisened engineer in a VP role who somehow is also a good people person, and pushes both up and down engineering quality above all else. It’s a very very rare combination.
> We’re definitely in a moment. I’ve seen a large shift away from discipline in the field. People don’t seem to care about professionalism or “good work”.
Agreed. Thinking back to my experience at a company like Sun, every build was tested on every combination of hardware and OS releases (and probably patch levels, don't remember). This took a long time and a very large number of machines running the entire test suites. After that all passed ok, the release would be rolled out internally for dogfooding.
To me that's the base level of responsibility an engineering organization must have.
Here, apparently, Crowdstrike lets a code change through with little to no testing and immediately pushes it out to the entire world! And this is from a product that is effectively a backdoor to every host. What could go wrong? YOLO right?
This mindset is why I grow to hate what the tech industry has become.
As an infra guy, it seems like all my biggest fights at work lately have been about quality. Long abandoned dependencies that never get updated, little to no testing, constant push to take things to prod before they're ready. Not to mention all the security issues that get shrugged off in the name of convenience.
I find both management and devs are to blame. For some reason the amazingly knowledgeable developers I read on here daily are never to be found at work.
Yes. I’ve had the same experience. Literally have had engineers get upset with me when I asked them to consider optimizing code or refactor out complexity. “Yeah we’ll do it in a follow up, this needs to ship now,” is what I always end up hearing. We’re not their technical leads but we get pulled into a lot of PRs because we have oversight on a lot of areas of the codebase. From our purview, it’s just constantly deteriorating.
IMO, if you want to write code for anything mission critical you should need some kind of state certification, especially when you are writing code for stuff that is used by govt., hospitals, finance etc.
Not certification, licensure. That can and will be taken away if you violate the code of ethics. Which in this case means the code of conduct dictated to you by your industry instead of whatever you find ethical.
Like a license to be a doctor, lawyer, or civil engineer.
There’s - perhaps rightfully, but certainly predictably - a lot of software engineers in this thread moaning about how evil management makes poor engineers cut corners. Great, licensure addresses that. You don’t cut corners if doing so and getting caught means you never get to work in your field again. Any threat management can bring to the table is not as bad as that. And management is far less likely to even try if they can’t just replace you with a less scrupulous engineer (and there are many, many unscrupulous engineers) because there aren’t any because they’re all subject to the same code of ethics. Licensure gives engineers leverage.
I think that could cause a huge shift away from contributing to or being the maintainer of open source software. It would be too risky if those standards were applied and they couldn't use the standard "as is, no warranties" disclaimers.
Actually, no it wouldn't, as the licensire would likely be tied with providing the service on a paid basis to others. You could write or maintain any codebase you want. Once you start consuming it for an employer though, the licensure kicks in.
Paid/subsidized maintainers may be a different story though. But there absolutely should be some level of teeth and stake wieldable by a professional SWE to resist pushes to "just do the unethical/dangerous thing" by management.
I might have misunderstood. I took it to mean that engineers would be responsible for all code they write - the same as another engineer may be liable for any bridge they build - which would mean the common "as is", "no warranty", "not fit for any purpose" cute clauses common to OSS would no longer apply as this is clearly skirting around the fact that you made a tool to do a specific thing, and harming your computer isn't the intended outcome.
You can already enforce responsibility via contract but sure, some kind of licensing board that can revoke a license so you can no longer practice as a SWE would help with pushback against client/employer pressure. In a global market though it may be difficult to present this as a positive compared to overseas resources once they get fed up with it. It would probably need either regulation, or the private equivalent - insurance companies finding a real, quantifiable risk to apply to premiums.
Trouble is, the bridge built by any licensed engineer stands in its location, and can't be moved or duplicated. Software however is routinely duplicated, and copied to places that might not be suitable for ite original purpose.
I’d be ok with this so long as 1) there are rules about what constitutes properly built software and 2) there are protections for engineers who adhere to these rules
I mean back in the mid teens we had the whole “move fast and break things” motif. I think that quickly morphed into “be agile” because no one actually felt good about breaking things.
We don’t really have any software engineering leaders these days. It would be nice if one stood up and said “stop being awful. Let’s be professionals and earn our money.” Like, let’s create our own oath.