I must confess that I am a Mechanical Engineer by training. Everything I learned about software engineering has been on the job and a lot reading and a fair amount of trial and error. When I first started my career as a Mechanical Engineer the group I was working with had written some software as part of a NASA contract. Since I had an interest, and as it turns out, an aptitude in dealing with programming, I naturally migrated into supporting this software. This software was written in Fortran (ugh)... At the time I thought it was a great programming language. In comparison to using Basic on a TRS80 (a whole 4K of memory) this was pretty much a step up.
As a Mechanical Engineer I had to take the Fundamentals of Engineering exam when I graduated. Depending on the field that I went into, I would have eventually needed to take another exam to become a licensed professional engineer. As it turns out, I took a different route and never crossed that bridge.
Should software engineers be licensed? Theoretically, no. Practically, maybe. The issue is really accountability. Most good software gets that way because of several factors. Mainly by the simple fact that bad software doesn't usually make money. Or if it does, eventually someone else will come along and do a better job.
The other way that software gets good, is because of the person who wrote it made it good.
Engineers are licensed because of loss of life due to things like bridge failures. Even so, there are still failures that occur even though an engineer signed off on the design. The real bottom line is whether you can make money or not. However, licensing does leverage into the idea that an individual will not want to sign off on something if their neck or license is on the line. Given the large number of people out there that picked up a "Dummies" programming book and are now "experts", I wonder if maybe this would help to separate the true engineers from the code jockeys.
Don't get me wrong, just because I have an engineering degree doesn't qualify me as a software engineer, and just as before professional mechanical engineering degree programs existed there were many who were highly qualified engineers. I feel that we are in a similar time frame where good software engineering training is more the exception than the rule.
I do a fair amount of college recruiting. However, our local university doesn't have a software engineering degree. They offer computer engineering and computer science. The good news is that these programs are part of the college of engineering rather than the college of science. They have a really nice senior design program that emphasizes software engineering.
There are still gaps though. It never ceases to amaze me how little a CS student knows about practical software engineering when they graduate. Their grasp of the languages that they used is usually very weak. The ones that actually do know something about it spend a lot of time learning on their own. This is a double edged sword though.
If you learn on your own you can often build very bad habits that are hard to correct later on. In addition, most of the professors teaching CS haven't spent that much time learning languages. This leads to huge gaps of knowledge or misplaced emphasis on what is important in a language.
I happen to have spent many years writing in C++. I consider myself to be advanced but by no means an expert in C++. I am continually learning something new about the language. In any case I digress from the point of this blog.
The point is that even if we did decide that licensing is a good thing, which it probably is, I wouldn't trust the knowledge base that might be required for licensing. Perhaps the best solution in the short term is to require software teaching credentials to include 10+ years of industry experience. If we get the professors on the right page in terms of what is important knowledge in the industry, then the rest will follow.
This will naturally occur over time, but will probably take several generations for the profession of software engineering education to catch up with industry.
On the other hand, it will take some pretty hard knocks for some of the industry to catch up with what is important. When you have pressures to push a product out the door to capture market share, or just to keep a company from going under and no personal accountability, we get varying results.
This too will naturally get corrected over time as these products and companies fail.
The bottom line though, is that you as a software engineer need to take personal responsibility for what you write. Become a craftsman. Make your code and the end product a thing of beauty. Write code that is defect free. Make sure you know your customer. Take responsibility for your code.
I doubt that this will become the norm, so when licensing becomes necessary, and you can't pass the test, do us all a favor and go work at a fast food place where your sloppiness and lack of accountability will be expected and rewarded with the salary that you deserve.
On the other hand, if you really are a great software engineer, no worries...
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