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Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) v4.0 is out [pdf]

(ieeecs-media.computer.org)
180 points beryilma | 15 comments | 21 Oct 24 19:16 UTC | HN request time: 1.264s | source | bottom
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0xbadcafebee ◴[21 Oct 24 23:47 UTC] No.41909738[source]▶
There appears to be a lot of hate towards this in the comments (because it's not perfect?), but I feel strongly that we need explicit bodies of knowledge, along with certifications for having been trained on it.

Every company I go to, the base of knowledge of all the engineers is a complete crapshoot. Most of them lack fundamental knowledge about software engineering. And they all lack fundamental knowledge about the processes used to do the work.

That's not how engineering should work. If I hire an architect, I shouldn't have to quiz them to find out if they understand Young's Modulus, much less teach them about it on the job. But that's completely normal in software engineering today, because nobody is expected to have already learned a universal body of knowledge.

I get this thing isn't perfect. But not being perfect isn't a rational argument for not having one at all. And we certainly need to hold people accountable to have learned it before we give them a job. We need a body of knowledge, it needs to be up to date and relevant, and we need to prove people have actually read it and understood it. If this isn't it, fine, but we still need one.

(this is, by the way, kind of the whole fucking point of a trade school and professional licensing... why the fuck we don't have one for software engineers/IT, boggles my fucking mind, if this is supposed to be the future of work)

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abtinf ◴[22 Oct 24 00:05 UTC] No.41909853[source]▶
> if this is supposed to be the future of work

The day computing becomes subject to professional licensure is the day the field of computing will fall into hopeless stagnation, just like every other such field.

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1. lotsoweiners ◴[22 Oct 24 00:43 UTC] No.41910087[source]▶
Maybe that’s not a bad thing…
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2. rockemsockem ◴[22 Oct 24 00:51 UTC] No.41910121[source]▶
Let me hear your pro-stagnation argument
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3. lantry ◴[22 Oct 24 01:12 UTC] No.41910230[source]▶
Here's my "pro-stagnation" argument: stagnation and stability are pretty much the same thing. There's a lot of infrastructure that we take for granted because it always works (water purification and distribution, bridges and roads, electrical generation and transmission, automobile engines, the quality of gasoline, the safety of food, etc). You trust that these things will work the way you expect, because they don't change very quickly. Is that stagnation or stability?
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4. Arainach ◴[22 Oct 24 01:14 UTC] No.41910234[source]▶
Let's start by fixing the language. It's not stagnation, it's predictability.

Civil and mechanical engineering are not static fields. They come up with new materials, new methods, new ideas. They have tooling to understand the impact of a proposed change and standard ways to test and validate things. It is much easier to predict how long it will take to both design and build things. These are all good things.

We would all benefit from fewer cryptoAI startups and frameworks of the week and more robust toolchains tested and evolved over decades.

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5. rockemsockem ◴[22 Oct 24 01:24 UTC] No.41910279{3}[source]▶
So I don't know about you, but I live in America where roads, electrical generation and transmission, water purification, and bridges are all in subpar shape.

That's super broad and I think there are complex reasons why each of these has failed, but it's pretty clear that stagnation hasn't helped and has probably actively caused harm by letting incompetence become too common in these areas.

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6. rockemsockem ◴[22 Oct 24 01:26 UTC] No.41910289{3}[source]▶
Why do you think such wrong things about civil and mechanical engineering.

Tell me about all the on time and under budget civil/mechanical engineering projects that are happening.

Do you think that just because they have physics to lean on that they can just like press solve and have accurate estimates spit out?

Edit: I totally agree that more long-lived battle tested software toolchains and libraries would be great though

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7. Arainach ◴[22 Oct 24 01:48 UTC] No.41910382{4}[source]▶
Such delays are overwhelmingly political, not engineering. The local government demanding yet another environmental impact review is not an engineering cost - it is a scope change.
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8. patmorgan23 ◴[22 Oct 24 01:56 UTC] No.41910425[source]▶
Code that changes introduces new bugs, new bugs can be new security issues. A lower velocity would hopefully mean less changes but higher quality, more thoroughly tested changes.
9. patmorgan23 ◴[22 Oct 24 02:02 UTC] No.41910452{4}[source]▶
This is just not the case.

The US has lots of infrastructure that needs repair or replacement, but there are very few areas that do not have clean water, or reliable electricity (Sans extreme weather which causes disruptions in every country), and roads and bridges are all safe to drive on (when was the last time you read about a bridge that collapsed from lack of maintenance?)

The US has its issues, but it does actually have a huge amount of superb, world class infrastructure.

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10. eacapeisfutuile ◴[22 Oct 24 02:03 UTC] No.41910456{5}[source]▶
Scope change is really not a foreign concept in the field of software engineering, including politically driven
11. mckn1ght ◴[22 Oct 24 02:08 UTC] No.41910489{4}[source]▶
How do you know things wouldn’t be much much worse if there were no standards for being a civil/structural engineer or architect that have been refined over long periods of time? Imagine municipalities taking the lowest bids by far thrown out there by any rando that decided they can make a few bucks by welding together the supports for a bridge or designing a really interesting building that will just cave in on itself a decade hence.
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12. Jtsummers ◴[22 Oct 24 02:26 UTC] No.41910608{5}[source]▶
> when was the last time you read about a bridge that collapsed from lack of maintenance?

2022.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fern_Hollow_Bridge

13. shiroiushi ◴[22 Oct 24 05:11 UTC] No.41911369{5}[source]▶
>reliable electricity (Sans extreme weather which causes disruptions in every country)

Freezing temperatures do not cause widespread outages in properly-run countries.

>roads and bridges are all safe to drive on (when was the last time you read about a bridge that collapsed from lack of maintenance?)

2022, when the President was in town in Pittsburg and the bridge there collapsed.

14. rockemsockem ◴[22 Oct 24 05:23 UTC] No.41911437{5}[source]▶
There are tons of physical engineers working on safety critical hardware that are not required to have some BS piece of paper that says they're safe.

You do not need a credential to work on EV charging infrastructure, rockets, crew capsules to ferry astronauts to the ISS, or many, many other things.

That's how you know, because those fields are not less safe. It's an easy comparison.

15. abtinf ◴[22 Oct 24 12:17 UTC] No.41913506{5}[source]▶
Licensure injects politics into the heart of engineering.