But I am also aware what the lack of it does. It leads to buildings falling down or burning up [with people in them]. This was a common occurrence 100+ years ago. You know what made it less common? Standardization. Building codes. Minimum standards for engineers and the trades. Independent studies have all concluded that real world outcomes improved across the board because of these things.

No formal certification or standard will lead to perfection. That is obvious. But what is also obvious, from actually looking at outcomes before and after their introduction, is that having them leads to better outcomes.

You have to stop thinking about individual engineers, and start thinking about the much, much larger picture. What changes will have a positive effect on the larger picture? You can only have an effect on the larger picture if you enforce a change across the board, and then look at the aggregate results.

That can not happen without a mechanism to enforce the change. We can't pray our way to better results, or just sit around hoping people magically get better at their jobs, because that clearly has not happened for the last few decades that I've been working.

The more we depend on technology, the more we see the failures of a lack of rigor. Probably every single person with an address and social security number in the United States has had their personal information leaked, multiple times over, by now. Lives are ruined by systems that do not take into consideration the consequences of a lack of safety, or the bias of its creators. Entire global transportation systems are shut down because nobody added basic tests or fail-safes to critical software infrastructure.

This shit isn't rocket science, man. It was all preventable. And just like with building codes, standards, licenses, etc, we can put things in place to actually teach people the right way to do things, and actually check for the preventable things, by law. If we don't, it's going to keep happening, and keep happening, and keep happening, and keep happening, forever.

We can do something to stop it. But we have to pound our fist on the desk and say, enough is enough. We have to put something imperfect in place to stem the tide of enshittification. Because there are consequences if we don't.

We have seen some of them globally in the form of warfare, but nothing compared to the devastation when the gloves come off. We have not yet seen an entire country's hacker resources attack the water, power, sanitation, food, and other systems of its enemy, all at once. But it's going to happen. And it's going to be devastating. Millions of people are going to die because some asshole set a default password on some SCADA systems. But it should have been impossible, because no SCADA system should be allowed to be sold with default passwords. That's the kind of thing we can prevent, just like you can't build a building today without a fire exit.

That's the really big obvious impact. The impact nobody sees are from tiny decisions all the time, that slowly affect a few people at a time, but on the scale of millions of businesses and billions of people, add up to really big effects. We can make a huge difference here too, which will only be visible in aggregate later on. Like public sanitation, clean water, or hand-washing with soap, nobody thinks about the dramatic effect on public health and longevity until it's clear after decades what kind of impact it made. Technology is everywhere, in every home, affecting every life. The more we improve it [as a standard], the more we will see huge positive impacts later.

It isn't possible to be a competent engineer, beyond the most junior levels, without having a pretty solid grasp of project management. You might not need to be a good project manager but in order to make competent engineering decisions you have to understand how your tasks fit into the whole.

Software engineering is programming professionally, with a dialogue on quality. Everything else is details.

The IEEE has been riding this horse for a very long time, in the face of very serious criticism (see the ACMs comments from a quarter century ago).

The presentation of it is _not even wrong_. It reads like a mid level manager at a very old enterprise firm wrote out what important at their firm, and took no material care for other ways. The SWEBOK has been that way for as long as I can remember ( an aside: my experience of Software Engineering academia has been so deeply negative to the point I wrote the field off in 2013. Decoupled from reality, PM oriented, toy studies- irrelevant. The SWEBOK is an artifact of that world. I should dip back in... Maybe Google & MS Research have done the real work here...)

There's a body of _practice_ that is mildly incidental. Most acronyms are fads. Lots of ephemeral technologies that only exist as painful grimaces. IE- CORBA- SOAP, etc...

Project management and quality management are also essentially contingent. One company does this. One that. Waterfall here. Agile there. Whirlpool the other.

What you're left with as non contingent and timeless is in the area of compilers, algorithms, etc. Which is not SWE at all.

If I were to write a swe body of knowledge, it would be in koan form, more than likely.