The trouble with licensing a profession like software development is that no-one really knows how to do it very well yet. It's far too young and diverse an industry to have that level of experience and consensus.
Lacking more objective standards, the most likely result of attempting to regulate at this stage seems to be regulators who talk a good talk -- such as the author of this article. Those people will not necessarily be the ones with either the best ideas currently available for building good software or the most useful experience and/or data to advance the state of the art in the future.
I sometimes work on software that really does have to behave properly because significant failures in production really could be very damaging. The idea that some of the careful, successful processes used on some of those projects might be required by regulation/legislation to give way to the kind of junk that a lot of consultants peddle is quite scary.
The trouble with licensing a profession like software development is that no-one really knows how to do it very well yet. It's far too young and diverse an industry to have that level of experience and consensus.
Only artificially so. Modern software development is mainly about re-inventing wheels from the 1970s with slightly different syntax and more bugs in. If we had settled on a language - doesn't matter what, Ada, ML, C, Lisp, FORTRAN - they're all Turing-complete after all - and gotten on with y'know actually building things, software engineering would be a mature discipline by now. Instead all the accumulated experience gets chucked out the window everytime fashion changes.
If C was the only language, then a vast body of experience would exist in it and no-one would be writing new code with off-by-one errors in it. What we have right now is everyone "knows" many languages, but actually has little experience with each one. And given the chance to use a new language, we jump at it, even tho' we all know better.
Given the vast body of experience we do have with using C and given that we are in fact still writing new code with off-by-one errors in it, I'm not sure this argument holds much water. There are plenty of developers who have decades of professional experience programming in C, and some of those people are really smart and make software that millions of people depend on, and they still make those mistakes. A bad workman might always blame his tools, but even a good workman will do a better job with better tools.
No kidding. If a team of Doctors, Lawyers or Professional Engineers (Civil, Mechanical, etc.) had been involved in a ethics disaster of similar scale, those people would be in danger of loosing the ability to continue practicing at a professional level.
There is almost certainly a PE that is responsible for the emissions systems in these cars.
That doesn't mean they are going to be the only person at the company that is responsible, but they signed off on it and are responsible for it in the context you speak of.
Lacking more objective standards, the most likely result of attempting to regulate at this stage seems to be regulators who talk a good talk -- such as the author of this article. Those people will not necessarily be the ones with either the best ideas currently available for building good software or the most useful experience and/or data to advance the state of the art in the future.
I sometimes work on software that really does have to behave properly because significant failures in production really could be very damaging. The idea that some of the careful, successful processes used on some of those projects might be required by regulation/legislation to give way to the kind of junk that a lot of consultants peddle is quite scary.