• HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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    5 months ago

    Or it needs to be a profession.

    Licensed professional engineers are expected to push back on requests that endanger the public and face legal liability if they don’t. Software has hit the point where failure is causing the economic damage of a bridge collapsing.

    • aidan@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Software engineering is too wide and deep for licensing to be feasible without a degree program- which would be a massive slap in the face to the millions of skilled self taught devs.

      • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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        5 months ago

        Some states let some people get professional licensure through experience alone. It just ends up taking more than a decade of experience to meet the equivalent requirements of a four year degree.

          • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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            5 months ago

            Why not? It is still valuing the self education of people. It just means having a license to manage the system requires people with significant experience.

            And it isn’t like a degree alone is required for licensure.

            • aidan@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              Because a decade of professional experience is a long time, and doesn’t value independent experience. I’ve been coding for over 11 years, but professionally only a couple. Also software development is very international, how would that even be managed when working with self-taught people across continents?

              I agree developers should be responsible, but licensing isn’t it, when there are 16 year olds that are better devs than master’s graduates.

              • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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                5 months ago

                Do we allow for self taught doctors or accountants?

                Also, these regulations aren’t being developed for all servers, just ones that can cause major economic damage if they stop functioning. And you don’t need everyone to be qualified to run the service. How many water treatment pants are there where you only have a small set of managers running the plant, but most people aren’t licensed to do so?

                • aidan@lemmy.world
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                  5 months ago

                  Do we allow for self taught doctors or accountants?

                  Is this limitation good? Furthermore, software development is something very easy to learn with 0 consequences.

                  Also, these regulations aren’t being developed for all servers, just ones that can cause major economic damage if they stop functioning.

                  Many of those have excellent self-taught devs developing software for them- I know some of them.

                  And you don’t need everyone to be qualified to run the service. How many water treatment pants are there where you only have a small set of managers running the plant, but most people aren’t licensed to do so?

                  1. Maintenance is very different from software development.

                  2. Good software development requires at minimum expansive automated testing…

                  • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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                    5 months ago

                    Do you trust anyone claiming to be self taught with the responsibility to design something that, if it fails, will cause billions in economic damage? Not the people you know, anyone who claims to be self taught?

                • aidan@lemmy.world
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                  5 months ago

                  Licensure isn’t about how good you are. It’s about ensuring that you, as a professional, understand the ramifications of your contributions to the work you do and the field you are a part of and accepting the responsibility of those ramifications.

                  1. Does it have a record across industries of demonstrably doing that? I don’t believe so.

                  2. Is there any evidence of that actually being a problem amongst self-taught devs? (And not a problem amongst traditionally degree’d devs?)

                  In my experience, self-taught devs have a higher sense of responsibility when it comes to code than fresh grads or boot-camp devs. But of course once someone’s been working for a bit it all evens out.