[mulmen]

I made a lot of bridges and cranes in my bedroom. They all failed spectacularly but GI Joe didn't seem to mind that the shear strength of a Lego pin was inadequate to support his tank.

The difference is that I don't then promise a municipality that I can build them a bridge that can take their citizens across a river, even in case of a 100 year event. Or an early warning system that can save their citizens from nuclear holocaust. This is the difference in maturity between software "engineering" and real engineering disciplines.

You're free to experiment with your own resources but as soon as you make a promise to the public or your customers you should be required to meet your promises in all circumstances.

[BurritoAlPastor]

This is a fine sentiment, but it's hardly a bright-line rule. We don't criticize Twitter's handling of abuse or fascists because they promised us a platform free of abusive fascists; Twitter didn't promise us shit except 140 character messages. All the problems were emergent.

So many of the great (financial) success stories of our sector are about startups stumbling into an untapped demand, and then running with it for as long as the money lasts. Nobody sets out to build a bridge – they build a 2x4 plank, and then realize that rather a lot of people want to walk on it.

[pas]

> This is the difference in maturity between software "engineering" and real engineering disciplines.

That's a difference between contractors, people, groups, teams, projects, etc. It has nothing to do with the "disciple of engineering" software or otherwise.

I've seen shitty mechanical engineering projects, but hey, it was cheap, so I don't blame the customer! (We're fighting the shit someone churned out from the software side.)

No one expects to go to a mechanical engineer and ask for a new car, 4 wheels, blue color, 200 horsepower, and a week later "could you just make it 8 wheeled, thanks" and a week later "could you also make it so it'll be fast even when run on a mix of vomit and vodka", and so on, yet it's the norm in software.

And we somehow compare it to bridges, because a lot of software is "critical infrastructure".

Put the two together, and it's no surprise it seems that software engineering is not mature enough.

It simply means some kid (or a team of expensive consultants), who knew nothing about long term risks of the combination of attention fatigue and shitty UX, said yes. Lowest bidder and all that too. Or because this was mission critical it never occurred to the procurers that a UX guy/gal should look at it.

[mulmen]

I think you're totally right about this but I also think it still speaks to the maturity of the industry and discipline of software engineering. We still have a lot of lessons to learn about building software, even in the cases where it is bid out like a bridge or built like an airplane. We just don't have as much experience under our belt. It's an oversimplification to say that software engineering is immature but I don't think it's wrong. I also don't think the current state of software engineering is even a bad thing or behind in any way, I just like to think we have a lot more to learn.

[pas]

Who is we though?

I mean the problem in other fields were solved by a brutal trade off toward a draconian prohibition. You can't practice medicine/law/civil-engineering without a license in a lot of states/countries.

But of course you can give CPR, you can help your relatives sort out their pills. You can talk about laws/statutes/regulations with anyone.

So where would we draw the line? Maybe official/public procurement projects must have a process requirement clause, describing good engineering discipline (clear problem statement, analysis of the problem, analysis of aspects by the relevant domain experts [such as UI/UX, security, network, hardware, etc.], general specification, implementation plan with risks identified and testing methodology outlined, used development methodology [SCRUM, KanBan, whatever])?

This doesn't require setting up big and bureaucratic a trade guild, but if something bad happens we can look at the [pre]filed papers and determine who fucked up. The procurers, the experts, or the dev team.