I studied physics, did a PhD and postdoc, the whole science shebang. When I got into software development a few years ago, I was put into a well functioning pizza sized team that developed an internal app for another company. The crew was as software-dev as it gets,:

- one architect who was there from the apps inception yen years prior, who knows all the ins and outs of the application - one project lead, who was with the project two years, who could also code in the classical sense, but was mostly the connection to the customer - a tester who could not code, but also knew the app in and out (from the user perspective) and found things or relayed and reproduced bugs reported by the customer - a technical writer who could also code (somewhat), but was more responsible to think of user behavior, undefined app behavior, edge cases, logic issues etc - and several disposable code monkeys, who were exchangeable and expendable, who did most of the tickets. I joined as one of these

The work was great, the team functioned great and we delivered what the customer wanted. But what really struck me was that software dev is not science, or engineering, or an art form, it's most akin to a trade like plumbing or carpentry. I had computer science as minor in university and pretty much none of what I learned there helped for "real" work. I learned SVN in university, but obviously the team used git. And all of the software development and programming courses I did taught me nothing of how real software is structured or how a team works.

That impression only more strongly once I had to train new hires, PhDs in comp science, who knew basically nothing about real software development.

Again, it's a trade, something you learn on the job from someone who already knows it, like a master carpenter.

Software lost that status in the vibe coding era. It's an art form now, not necessarily something worse or easier, just different than engineering. But probably not the career path anymore for those who prefered math over philosophy in college.

Of course it's not real engineering, and most software development never was real engineering.

Trying to apply real engineering licensing ideas to software would just result in the word "engineering" no longer being used in the vast majority of cases. If that's your goal, then sure, great. But it won't stop ridiculous security mistakes from being made, they'll just be made by people with different job titles.

If a civil engineer made a negligent mistake that bad which "made it to production", rather than being caught before the structure collapsed, he would spend a decade in prison for negligent homicide.

https://www.constructiondive.com/news/contractors-sentenced-...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/cjpva1/is_it_...

https://www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/oped/commentary/it-s-a12-ye...

The entire reason the company was funded is the US government started enforcing FCRA compliance on 1099 Uber drivers.

So the government did get involved and regulated Uber and the entire gig economy, and the private sector is so powerful they just made their own background check company with hundreds of millions of dollars in VC and hype, gave them Uber as their flagship customer and wiped their hands.

No doubt in my mind these people were "just happy to be here" at best, criminals at worst, and have no business working with PII and background checks. Founders and everyone there.

But I still think the company should be found liable, not an individual engineer. They would be a lot more incentivized to hire based on merit, and not incentivized to literally be corrupt like they are now.

With your idea of punishing the engineer... these VCs would love that. Shift even more blame onto the worker, why not, we've taken it for everything else

To be fair, if the story in the comment you are replying to is actually factual and the company is found to be leaking private information on this scale, it can face pretty harsh legal consequences.