But in order to be the "person who would say no", the industry needs to understand that your opinion and expertise--matter. It could be a cultural shift, or a gate-keeping style shift where we protect the title "Engineer", like they do in some professions in some countries.
But given the current state, you can't on one hand blame the developers, and on the other hand treat them like spoiled kids who make too much money and in any way AI can replace most of them. It doesn't work this way. A Structural Engineer bears the responsibility because he has the authority, and respect to his knowledge, to refuse to sign off a broken design. This is not the case in software engineering.
To what extent is this because we act like spoiled kids? I really do mean "we" here; I probably have acted like that sometimes. I wonder if we, the post-microcomputer generations, are messed up to some extent because we started programming as a fun distraction from the work we were supposed to be doing, rather than learning programming as a serious job from the beginning like our predecessors who learned on mainframes or minicomputers in college.
Right. This is my point exactly. It’s hard to have it both ways. We can’t both carry the burden of responsibility for society, and expect truck drivers to learn programming in a 12 week bootcamp. It’s hard to expect programmers to have rigor in our work if we hire programmers who are self taught. And that’s a bitter pill to swallow, because lots of self taught software engineers are really good.
But we don’t need to boil the ocean for things to improve. You personally can still decide you don’t want to make software that harms society. You personally can push back against your company if they want you to sell your users data. Nobody really knows how much they should respect your opinions and skills, so they’ll try things on. If you don’t respect yourself, nobody else will either.
But in order to be the "person who would say no", the industry needs to understand that your opinion and expertise--matter. It could be a cultural shift, or a gate-keeping style shift where we protect the title "Engineer", like they do in some professions in some countries.
But given the current state, you can't on one hand blame the developers, and on the other hand treat them like spoiled kids who make too much money and in any way AI can replace most of them. It doesn't work this way. A Structural Engineer bears the responsibility because he has the authority, and respect to his knowledge, to refuse to sign off a broken design. This is not the case in software engineering.