Despite the fetishization of “real engineering” and “standards”, once again we come down to the bare truth: software engineers are the only ones with true ethical standards. Easily measured by numbers of people killed. In fact, web front-end engineers are far more ethical than any others. If you work at Slack you are a better engineer than Boeing aeronautics. Never forget this.
Well, drones don't have any Slack instances running on them. If you want to exclude all defence contractor software-engineers from the list of software-engineers that's fine. I am comfortable with that. Though I suppose when your job is killing people, killing people is a sign of competence. I think Boeing wasn't trying to kill people with the 737 Max, but I'm no expert on corporate psychology.
The important thing to remember is that true engineering is building Electron and React apps not whatever nonsense all these guys who go around constantly accidentally killing people do. Aeronautics, such a poor field with poor standards. Any guy using React+Redux is a superior engineer. After all, he won't be killing anyone by accident.
I know you’re trolling, but even your troll argument is flawed. WayFair sold furniture (ahem, cages) to ICE. Facebook monetizes murderers with ads. People suck. Engineers in general are trying to make a better world. Sure “better” might mean “my missile is better than my enemy’s missile”. Or “my ads are more engaging than my competitor”. But engineers are building things. Through and through, engineers build. Not too many professions can honestly say they create.
Oh sure, you're going on the Evil/Good angle. That's fine. But let's set it aside for the moment because I will probably just agree with you on whichever stance you take, since I don't particularly care. I guess I did confuse the matter by using the words 'ethics' but I meant "not presenting your ability as far beyond what it is" so perhaps I can clarify and we can move on from that.
I'm going on the competent/incompetent angle which is orthogonal. The problem is that those guys just aren't good engineers. If they want to kill people and they're doing it, or they want to sell to ICE and they're doing it, or they want to monetize murders and they're doing it, then they're good at it. That's competence.
Aeronautics engineers, though. They want to make things fly and they fall instead. I don't think they've wanted to kill Boeing passengers, but you know, considering their skill, perhaps they did, perhaps they did. In which case, you're right, that's a field of highly competent passenger killers who we thought were incompetent passenger fliers!
Web developers writing React on the other hand? Zero people intended to be killed. Zero people killed. Billions of dollars of value. Creativity. Ability. Competence. The virtues of a real engineer. Perhaps one day other fields can emulate their techniques to understand how they do it.
