Post #2018410

Like, seriously, we make people get a piece of paper before they can put together a bridge. We do that because the downsides of “a bridge being built by someone who hasn’t gone through at least a minimum of intensive training” are _much_ worse than the downsides of “making people get a piece of paper before making bridges”. When you write code, you’re…probably (_probably_) not going to kill anyone. This is a thing some juniors need to hear and internalize, but also: Everything is computers now. All of it. Computers touch every single aspect of modern life. And that means that when, not if, you screw up, your code is going to hurt someone. It might be something stupid. “God dammit I can’t sign in to neopets because their identity server fell over”. Some of the time you write property management software that doesn’t stop charging an account when that account has a zero balance, and then a property owners association keeps charging the account 400 dollars for three months before the person whose house they’re managing comes to them and asks “hey why did I just pay you 1200 bucks over three months? I literally don’t have that money and need to go to a food bank now”, and then you find out the app has no way to reverse this, except to hire a “consultant” to drive 90 minutes from the nearest major city to UPDATE (balance) IN accounts VALUE (0) WHERE resident.mastodonhandle = b4ux1t3 (that sql is a war crime) The programmer who writes this code isn’t…a bad person. They didn’t do anything wrong, per se, when they introduced this bug. But they hurt someone. Because of a basic lack of forethought and planning. Do you know what the bulk of engineering accreditation consists of? Learning all the ways, obvious and otherwise, that your systems can fail and proactively accounting for them. So you tell me, reader: do you want the person writing your banking software to have no formal training whatsoever on “building financial systems”? (I won’t be getting into arguments about the efficacy or otherwise of accreditation programs. Some are bad, some are excellent, but your anecdotal experience dealing with engineers does not change the fact that engineering programs, like regulations, are written on blood.)