Are software engineering “best practices” just developer preferences?
&quot;The parallel he drew was to another friend who’s a Civil Engineer. His friend had to be state certified and build everything to certain codes that stand up to specific stressors and inspections.<p>I gave him the usual answer about how Software Engineers deal with low stakes and high iterability compared to Civil Engineers, but, honestly, he has a point.&quot;<p>I&#x27;ve argued for awhile now that Software Engineering with a big E should be licensed and regulated the same as any other Engineering discipline. Not all software is low stakes and fast changing. In fact I&#x27;d argue the most important software is never that. software for control systems, avionics, cars etc are very high stakes and have no reason to iterate beyond what is needed to interface with changing hardware. I think if software engineers had to be licensed to work on such things then those 737s wouldn&#x27;t have fallen out of the sky and Tesla wouldn&#x27;t be allowed to beta test self driving cars on public roads.<p>To those who ask what do you now call software engineers who don&#x27;t work on those things, you are programmers. Or if you prefer a less formal term, coders. Engineer is a powerful word and I don&#x27;t like how the we the IT industry have appropriated it for less critical tasks.