Reminds me of the Therac-25 incident..
this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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This, right here, is why "professional" software "engineers" should be licensed.
Former healthcare to software engineer working on a master's here. My colleagues who were licensed back in healthcare weren't all of the same quality. They all made mistakes at one point or another, some pretty bad some minor. There's no difference though, minor could just as well become major.
The way they get around it in healthcare is by throwing more people at the problem. You have a physician who is good at pointing in the general direction of the problem and a solution, then you have all the auxiliary staff who will narrow down on the solution based on their field. But at any single point all of them could fuck up, or one of them could.
Now that I'm a software engineer and I've written enough code to do stuff. I can confidently say that licensing will not solve this problem. Especially if there aren't enough people involved. Which is probably what was missed in the beginning.
Anyway long rant over.
Licensing isn't about magically ensuring that the practitioner won't make mistakes; it's about holding the practitioner accountable for his mistakes, which in theory gives him more incentive to be more careful -- or to change his practice's workflows and systems so as to be better able to detect and correct mistakes.
In fact, I would argue that the "throwing more people at the problem" phenomenon in healthcare is an example of that very thing. Do you think they'd keep staffing levels equally high without licensing? 'Cause I sure don't.
So, what you say is let's hold the lowest level accountable, the person who may don't have any power over the fcked up decisions about the amount of developers, presence of QA, and timeline.
No, licensing will not make "accountable" people magically incentivised enough to make no mistakes
A licensed Professional Engineer is exactly the opposite of the lowest level person. In fact, that's part of the point: giving the experts the power to say "no" to unsafe/unethical management.
Ok, stated that way it makes more sense, thanks for the explanation
Don't think that kind of thing is going to happen, though