Meta and TikTok are obstructing researchers' access to data, EU commission rules

I'd hate to be the engineer that has to deal with these requests. Not even a formal government investigation, just any number of random 3rd party researchers demanding specialized access.

> Engineer

Let me know when devs get stamps that make them legally liable for their decisions. Only then will that honor be applicable to software.

Most of my friends are mechanical or aerospace engineers and it's all the same job in a different medium (many do a significant amount of software as part of their work). They don't have stamps and aren't any more legally liable than we are and staying we aren't engineers just seems to be a misunderstanding of what engineering is.

I grew up in a structural and civil engineering family. My issue is that there is no path to "professional engineer" or "architect" in software, which as a Hammurabi old, makes me suspect of the entire profession. I am involved in software dev, and I would never call it engineering. This might be niche semantics, and yet it feels very important to me.

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

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

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

I was an industrial electrician before I was a paid programmer.

I worked with engineers, what we generally do isn’t engineering by the standards of those engineers.

Which isn’t to say that all software development isn’t.

People writing avionics software and medical software etc are doing what I’d recognise as engineering.

It’s about the process more than anything.

Software in the wild is simply a young field and we aren’t there yet widely.