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

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)

> 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.

Maybe that’s not a bad thing…

Let me hear your pro-stagnation argument

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?

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.

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.