Regulatory compliance is 90% social and 10% reality.
Again our experiences are on opposite ends of the spectrum. For safety issues in particular getting an engineer to sign off some plan when they will be accountable for that authority later is often easiest if you simply design the thing properly.
I have certainly seen compliance become a box-ticking exercise in other contexts but usually this seems to happen when the professionals involved were not personally responsible for their own decisions.
Imagine a new grad telling their boss “we aren’t going to build it like that because I learned X in school”. They have the same credentials!
We appear to live in different realities on this one too. In my reality new grads are not the people signing off major decisions in regulated industries and no-one would seriously suggest that a new grad's degree was an equivalent credential to the years of demonstrable professional experience and peer review that are typically required to reach a level of professional qualification where someone does have the authority to sign off those big decisions. Getting an undergraduate degree in a subject like engineering or medicine or law is just a foot in the door. The real work starts afterwards.
> For safety issues in particular getting an engineer to sign off some plan when they will be accountable for that authority later is often easiest if you simply design the thing properly.
That's exactly right. An engineer aims to build a safe and reliable product (not because the credentials tell him to)! The regulatory myth is that all products are death machines until being redeemed.
That's why I say it's 90% social. The engineer builds a reasonable product. With regulation they do the same, but now they need to do work to frame that same work in regulatory terms.
Real fixes are made. The value isn't 0, but it comes at that cost.
> no-one would seriously suggest that a new grad's degree was an equivalent credential to the years of demonstrable professional experience
That's exactly what I'm saying! Professional experience and reputation within the field is what:
1. gives someone influence and credibility.
2. results in safe and reliable engineering projects.
And note that those are actually informal defined qualifications. It's NOT the credential!
So trying to add credentials to software is an attempt to bump the quality of new grads and has little to no impact on the quality of engineering leadership. As you said, the recent undergrads already lack power and influence, and the credential is simply the bare minimum to participate.
That’s not what I said,
For every human activity there is an underlying reality and there is a social component of how it’s framed or talked about.
Regulatory compliance is 90% social and 10% reality.
So a focus on compliance means engineers spend less of their time on reality.
> They won't be impressed at all by someone's big title and even bigger budget while they're exercising that professional judgement either
Correct. But they do care about their management chain.
Imagine a new grad telling their boss “we aren’t going to build it like that because I learned X in school”. They have the same credentials!