This is a new satire site, right? These days it’s getting harder and harder to differentiate between reality and fiction in tech. The rest of their posts are pretty much spot on.
I disagree, I believe the regulatory agencies do nothing in Canada to legitimize their claim to regulating software development. Heck, they do nothing for electronics or semiconductors or anything smaller than the power grid.
Software development is done by developers. If you are a software engineer chances are you’re working on software infrastructure that actually apply at scales that are not “add a shopping cart to this blog”.
There are reasons you ask a civil engineer for work.
You missed my point that if professional engineering societies in Canada want to take ownership of software and electronics, they better do something and not just say they’re regulating it and sit on it with no clear definition for what it even is.
If they were doing their job, we wouldn’t need to debate what a software engineer is. They’ve let us down and they’re getting away with it.
They’re regulating engineering of software and electronics.
From Engineers Canada;
In the case of software engineering, a piece of software (or a software-intensive system) can therefore be considered an engineering work if both of the following conditions are true:
• The development of the software required “the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software.”
• There is a reasonable expectation that failure or inappropriate functioning of the system would result in harm to life, health, property, economic interests, the public welfare, or the natural environment.
That does seem to me well defined. If you disagree then it’s okay.
Not so much well defined as fancy words. There is no example of a paying software development that has no economic impact if the software were to fail.
If I ran a small shopify page for goat feed, I’d be an engineer for making sure the site stayed working so farmers could order their feed. It could even put lives at risk!
It really only excludes someone privately working on a video game for fun.
So given that, what are they actually regulating? What are they providing to their members to help them become better “software engineers”. I say it’s nothing at all? +
If you’re a software engineer, you’re applying an engineering process to the field of software development. Adding a shopping cart to a blog can be a perfectly sound solution to the problem at hand.
Engineering becomes more important at scale, but scale itself doesn’t define engineering.
That’s missing the point. Engineers perform at a specific level. You don’t expect civil engineers to build the bridge. Can they do it? Sure. But that’s not the profession. Same with Structural Engineers, Chemical Engineers, Industrial Engineers, etc. They are at a higher level in the planification and execution process and will likely have signatory responsibilities on the project. If the bridge falls, the engineer does have explaining to do.
The equivalent for a software engineer would be (in the US) more at the level of architect with responsibilities higher than developers.
But engineers is not a protected term so everyone is an engineer now.
That’s a very arbitrary delineation that just seems to be something you worked out backwards to support your claim. I’m an EE and software developer and I sometimes do projects involving both fields (which would be computer engineering, I guess), and there’s really not that much difference. I certainly don’t see why I would label half of it engineering and the other half not.
It’s sort of based in reality. In general most software jobs are closer to technician work than engineering these days. However, there definitely are lots of software jobs which do qualify as engineering.
I don’t take any article post or comment seriously anymore. Between the era of misinformation and advancements in AI, my trust in the internet is at an all time low.
To be fair, we do develop stuff. Nothing implies quality, so it’s not like we’re misrepresenting anything. Personally, anyone who calls themselves a software engineer and works with any web-related technology (PHP, JavaScript, etc) are the ones to be shunned.
I’m a full-stack web developer and am involved all the way through including cloud infrastructure, API development, database creation/maintenance, test automation, architecture etc.
I guess what makes a “developer” in your context different? Embedded? Kernel?
Only those who code in the same language as I am can be called developers. Everyone else is just an impostor and their technology doesn’t matter! Real programmers use my language of choice
Heyyy its your super duper new project manager! I hope you are feeling a-mazing because you are my a-ce on the team. Anyways i need you to do things twice as fast, because we are running low on budget after sales promised another feature without extra billing and the CEO already signed off on it. Please make this happen somehow. If this project isn’t succesfull i’ll get fired and have to sell the house. But no pressure!
Never used it in over 23 years of using PHP. Also, I don’t thing that has existed anymore for the past 10 years or so?
Seriously, if we’re going to do this, can we also bitch about painful java apps from 10 years ago, or the hilariously shitty modules in node from 10 years ago? I can go on for a while, but you hopefully get the point.
My confusion is that you hate it tosay because someone over a decade ago wrote 10 times the same complaint that was mostly fixed already since about a decade ago
That article is over a decade old. A lot of these issues aren’t relevant any more or have been fixed. Some weren’t even PHP issues, for example mysql_real_escape_string is a MySQL API (dev.mysql.com/…/mysql-real-escape-string.html).
PHP isn’t the best language, but it’s not as bad as some people claim it to be, especially if you use a good framework like Laravel.
lol, no… it sucks
trust me, if you’ve already gotten used to php, you’re smart enough to learn a better language.
really just use node if you’re going that sorta route…
ECMA 6 has had drastic improvements over the past js… however node is still infinitely better than php, and since javascript is inexorably a part of web development, it’s a lot more logical to use it on the backend too…
i don’t mean that node is great, i mean that it’s an easy transition from php, a billion times better, and much more modern and useful… so a very natural transition…
ECMA 6 has had drastic improvements over the past js…
Sure, but it still lacks basic built-in features. For example, why do maps and sets not have sort or filter methods? In Node, why is there no built-in way to connect to a database of any sort? Why can Node.js apps only use a single time zone? Requiring libraries for everything is not ideal as the libraries vary wildly in quality and they can end up either abandoned or containing malware (which has happened several times in the Node ecosystem).
still infinitely better than php
They each have their pros and cons, depending on use case. Node.js does some things better than PHP, but the opposite is true too.
You can build a whole PHP website without using any third-party libraries, and it’ll work on any web host that supports PHP (literally any good web host that exists today). There’s value in having that level of flexibility.
You can build a PHP site today and it’ll mostly still be working (maybe with some minor changes) in 5 years, whereas for some of my Node.js sites I have to switch to an older version of Node just to build them. For example obviousspoilers.com has been practically untouched since 2009.
The fact that PHP can run multiple apps in the same FPM process means that you can run thousands of sites on a single server without issues. There’s some non-Node solutions to this (like Cloudflare workers) but they’re mostly proprietary at the moment.
There are more PHP than Node.js jobs, and far more sites use PHP. Wordpress uses PHP and powers over 40% of the web, so that means that at least 40% of all websites use PHP.
wordpress does not power 40% of the web…
im not going to argue any more than that because this is a humorous type community, and ya’ll are getting too serious.
i hope you enjoy all of your “programming” with your garbage little “language” and POS word🤢press🤮
p.s. notice how everyone who argues in favor of php and wordpress ONLY know that language and framework?
what a curious thing…
also downvotes aren’t supposed to be used just because you disagree with someone’s opinion. Your comments seem like a typical redditor so please just go back to Reddit if you’re going to use downvotes that way.
That is literally a decade old article with basically 1 complaint that sometimes functions are strpos() and sometimes str_len(). Anything else it’s saying is “I don’t even know how to say it”. Really now? Any of your complaints have been fixed since about a decade ago, so why don’t you give it a try?
yeah and they only get you around the neighborhood, any actual distance and a motorcycle is infinitely better…
but, it figures you’d miss that, since you’re a dumby dumbo mcpoopoo head webdev
Now you’re throwing ad hominem around. You don’t need to be toxic to communicate your point, web development did at one point have a lot of growing to do and I can admit that there is still plenty of progress to be made. In 2024 however, ignoring the web ecosystem as any type of developer is purely traditionalist elitism.
Please refrain of using offensive words, specially if you are trying to actually communicate an idea that is by all means demeaning to other people. The community is about humour, keep that in mind ;)
Tried looking. According to one of the users who posted it its by 0x00 whos the person who made floor 796. All things I can find relating to them are floor 796 related though and can’t find where this was originally posted
Heres floor 796 though if anyones interested floor796.com
I worked at a place where I did the not-funny-but-serious-and-banal version of this bit, including the burnout breakdown at the end. I’m working on ERP systems now and it’s a lot less stressful, plus things just have normal names like “Accounting Module” or “Third Party X Service Connector”.
Lol, is funny you ask. I mainly worked on interfaces.
The medical industry makes the banking industry look nimble.
The organization had a couple interfaces using the protocol when I left. But adoption is slow, just about everyone still uses HL7. But it has been a couple years.
I asked because I’ve been working in the same field for 10 years, interfaces as well. You can count our FHIR interfaces on one hand, the rest is DICOM, HL7 or proprietary.
The thing is, at first I actually, responded with “you are right”. See, humans make errors. Also, this isn’t a competence competition. (At least I hope so.)
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