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As a licensed Professional Engineer and wannabe programmer, this guy should get off his high horse. There's a difference between an engineer and a Professional Engineer. Much of the engineering industry, electrical, mechanical, chemical, etc. does not require licensure. It's only needed in specific industries where engineering services are offered directly to the public. I don't think anyone is confusing software engineers with PEs. And building things in the public interest? Please. These things our built in our client's interest. Yes, sometimes that client is "the public" in the form of a local, state or Federal government, but not always, and for many engineers, hardly ever. It's also dubious that the government's interest coincides with the public interest. I worked for a firm that bid on the contract to design the NSA's 60MW datacenter in Utah. We didn't win, but someone did, and they happily took the money to build it. Public interest indeed. Yes, we recommend building things in sustainable, efficient ways whenever possible, but at the end of the day someone else is footing the bill. As long as they aren't asking for something outright illegal or dangerous, they'll get it. If they want to knock together a building that barely meets code minimum requirements, that's what they'll get. > Today’s computer systems pose individual and communal dangers that we’d never accept in more concrete structures like bridges, skyscrapers, power plants, and missile-defense systems. It's still pretty early days as far as computer systems go. It's only a little over a hundred years ago that hundreds of people died in a fire[1] causing us to realize the egress doors need to always swing outwards and should not be locked. And that's after how many millennia of building buildings? We don't accept these dangers now because we know what they are after people having died from them in the past. We won't know what things we will need to watch for in computing until they happen. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi... |
As soon as I read the tagline, I thought, "Surely he's presuming all engineering is civil engineering." That's the only way that argument holds.