Software engineers are not real engineers.
Hear the argument:
Traditional engineering:
1. Licensed. You sign off on a bridge, your license is on the line.
2. Regulated. Failure = investigation, accountability, legal consequences.
3. Physics-bound. You can't ship a bridge that collapses and patch it Tuesday.
Software engineering:
1. Unregulated. Anyone can call themselves a software engineer.
2. Patchable. Broken code ships, gets fixed later. Users absorb the failure.
3. No professional liability. A bug that grounds 500 flights? No engineer loses their license.
The Boeing 737 MAX killed 346 people because of a software error.
No software engineer was prosecuted.
The most powerful engineering discipline in the world has the weakest accountability system.
Where should the line be?