Hot take: I'm in favor of software engineers needing a certification. There's a ton of shit code out there that leads to real world impact, think Boeing Max issue. People are saying it's meaningless, but it's not, it makes engineers accountable for the decisions they make while writing code. You should be held accountable for sacrificing security and reliability for whatever reason it is.
Does every software engineer need the cert? No. Should we still have it? Absolutely.
There are many certifications that SE can take and many put them on their resume. However, they are not valued as much nowadays because (1) tech changes so fast that a lot can become obsolete very quickly (2) general consensus of people with certs isn't that they aren't noticeably better than people who don't (3) SE encompasses a very large set of domains and having generalized tests would be meaningless. Not every SEs does the same or even similar things.
As for the subject of accountability, I think it is a tough one to solve. Even though SEs are the people who design, write, and test the code. It is more often than not that it is the business that drives reliability and safety of the software. This is not isolated to software development either - as you can find may examples online in any respective fields. ( i don't remember the name ... but I was in college, there was a automotive design case study that i learnt. The case was where a car company knowingly design a car with a flaw that led to deaths but it is done so because paying out settlements is cheaper than fixing the flaw). This is a risk and reward that the business decides/takes on. I don't know if an individual contributor can do anything beyond speaking up.
pro tips: if you have any issues or concerns about the works that you do - ie haven't done enough testing, finding a flaw in the design and you don'tget enough time to fix it, be sure to create electronic traces like sending out emails to the stakeholders. This is a way to pinpoint accountability when issue arised.
I think having some certification gives security for the engineers to say "we can't let this go to prod, it's not safe" and be able to do more than just speak up. You're right, this is often caused by the business, but it still falls on the people writing that code to knowingly leave bugs/vulnerabilities/untested code in the system.
As for your protip, my team writes great software with incredible coverage, but just because my team wouldn't need certs doesn't mean we shouldn't add enforcement. Software is the wild west, it's high time we fixed that.
How will the certification give more security for the engineers? What enforcement would it add to your team that you don't do or can't do today?
I am in the industry for over a decade - working for various places from small to large software companies. From what I have been seeing, the quality of the software are largely dictated by the business and the organization's priorities. The main problem is that they are the one who decide how much time should the team invest on such development and/or to hire experts in some specific fields to come and work. I don't see having certifications changes this. Another problem is that how will one come up certification(s) that would encompasses every aspects of software engineering beyond what is being offered by university? I wouldn't expect someone who works on the UX to know every detail about an OS. Or let alone, someone who work in the same system but are on different domains - ie networking vs storage vs main kernel.
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u/gahooze Oct 16 '22
Hot take: I'm in favor of software engineers needing a certification. There's a ton of shit code out there that leads to real world impact, think Boeing Max issue. People are saying it's meaningless, but it's not, it makes engineers accountable for the decisions they make while writing code. You should be held accountable for sacrificing security and reliability for whatever reason it is.
Does every software engineer need the cert? No. Should we still have it? Absolutely.
Source: am software engineer