This thread on Hacker News terrifies me

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, August 31, 2018 4:23:09 PM MDT Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> On 8/31/2018 1:42 PM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> > Some countries do have engineering certifications and professional
> > permits for software engineering, but its still a minority.
>
> That won't fix anything, because there is NO conventional wisdom in
> software engineering for how to deal with program bugs. I suspect I am
> the first to try to apply principles from aerospace to general
> engineering (including software).
>
> For example, in any CS program, are there any courses at all about this?

There are probably some somewhere, but most CS programs really aren't about
writing good software or even being a software engineer. Some definitely try
to bring some focus on that, but it's far, far more common that the focus is
on computer science concepts and not on software engineering. A good CS
program gives you a lot of theory, but they're rarely big on the practical
side of things. I think that it's a rarity for programmers to graduate
college with a good understanding of how to be a good software engineer in
the field. That's the sort of thing that they're much more likely to learn
on the job, and plenty of jobs don't do a good job with it. Motivated
programmers can certainly find resources for learning good software
engineering skills and/or find mentors who can help them learn them - and
many programmers do - but it's _very_ easy to learn enough programming to
get a job and get by without being very good at it. And if a programmer
isn't really motivated to improve themselves, it's highly unlikely that
they're going to have good software engineering skills. It's often pretty
scary how poor the average programer is, and in my experience, when trying
to hire someone, you can end up going through a lot of really bad candidates
before finding someone even passable let alone good.

- Jonathan M Davis