I think the general hacker culture of most programmers prevents this. There's an undercurrent of anti-establishment, anti-authority, anti-management, etc... To think that the industry might choose to self enforce a license system seems very unlikely.

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The prejudice seems to be everywhere. Unfortunately, to my knowledge.

Eg. architects vs construction engineers vs land surveyors vs construction designers vs urban planners… anyone of them thinks that their profession is more valuable than the others…

An example of prejudice? What an extraordinary statement. It’s an example of ethical, competent, responsible professionalism.

The ‘incentive structure’ is non-financial and based on the ethics of valuing other humans. This is a professional duty. To even call it a ‘incentive structure’ feels like it’s missing the point.

I understand the direction of your comment, engineering doesn't guarantee security either.

Hubris is the single biggest downfall, whether it's pegged on insecurity, or a false sense of knowledge, superiority or entitlement.

The very best and most experienced people I know have deep expertise, and maintain a healthy mistrust of their own work to keep an eye on it and improving it.

Real world experience and run history is a big thing, and people can re-learn the lessons of the past over and over with their egos, or also be open to learning from others to learn quicker.

It's because the first sentence of the American Society of Civil Engineers code of ethics is:

Members of The American Society of Civil Engineers conduct themselves with integrity and professionalism, and above all else protect and advance the health, safety, and welfare of the public through the practice of Civil Engineering.

The first tenant of a software engineers code of ethics is:

fuck it, make the boss some money.

Or, formally, according to the ACM:

Contribute to society and human well-being.

Which means fuck-all and includes absolutely zero enforcement like it does for real engineering professions. So do us all a favor and don't whine about our discipline's lack of standards while dipshits who call themselves software engineers are tokenmaxxing a pile of shit and SEO optimizing manipulative user environments for profit.

It's worse than that. Google will get rid of you if you are just fixing bugs. Ergo, the people who are inclined to fix are forced out or forced not to fix.

Youtube should consider their engineers responsible for the software they write. Big companies these days are just bureaucracy tricks and politics. There's a small handful of real talent, but they're quickly moving to new startups.

Also, I'm Canadian as well, and almost everyone calls themselves "software engineer" these days. You just can't say P.eng. in your title. You could be forced to remove it from linkedin/etc if you're called out, but it rarely happens.

Once I worked in a company that had an ex-Googler on the board, who insisted on calling us engineers and wanted us to call ourselves that. In swedish, of course, 'ingenjörer'.

It's not a protected title in Sweden, but we still refused, because we were nothing like engineers. We were a minuscule team of mostly self-taught hackers who happened to be employed to solve business problems in a system for managing other companies and their customers. I had some idea of the rigour of engineering but my colleagues did not, still, they also weren't willing to appropriate the title.

This lead to meetings with this person being quite uncomfortable at times, embarrassing even. To me it was an obvious sign that they were unfit for managing roles. Two thirds of the team, me included, resigned at the same time after they had been increasingly active in the management of the technical department.

Since he was on the board the CEO could not get rid of him even though he knew that this person was destroying the dev team.

I'm working on automotive safety-critical security-critical stuff. There is structure and bureaucracy around this stuff.

For example, a project gets a safety managers assigned who has to sign off the release. Project management is explicitly not superior to this safety manager. In most cases these safety managers are just there review stuff according to some process guidelines. If there is pressure (project is late, etc), there are more senior safety managers to call in and they will usually make more nuanced safety arguments (in this specific case, violate this guideline, but at least do X as mitigation).

In the end there is bureaucracy. Things need to be signed and archived for potential law suits. Not having archived things will be even worse in the law suits.

The upside: As a programmer, you don't need to argue that you need some time for unit testing.

The downside: 100% test coverage is mandatory and it really gets enforced.

All sorts of employees are treated as disposable. The issue is absolutely that software engineers have no culture of responsibility or safety and no professional licensing group to enforce it for them.