> I quickly found out that IS research had already figured most of this out
> People suck, organizations suck, societies suck
and yet you don't see very many buildings collapse, bridges fail, and damns flood down valley. The idea is that there should be liability assigned to important systems, for which this liability makes the onus on the creator/owner to build in safe guards, checks or other protections to prevent disasters.
Why this isn't applied to software engineering is a whole nother story, but i think it probably should. Move fast and break things is not something i wanted to hear tbh.
There is something about how buildings, bridges, and damns are tangible and therefore easier for people to conceptualize and appreciate. There is a natural literacy there in that you don't have to understand what goes into making a bridge to understand the consequences of having a bad bridge.
Meanwhile, software's inner workings are encapsulated so that they're not self-evident as to consequences if things go awry. Furthermore, software is inconsistent in how it works, and this trains people to think that software is just naturally glitchy, but the glitches aren't a big deal. See the joke about different types of engineers also: https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/pqr8t3/four_engineer...
The mechanical engineer says: “It’s a broken starter”
The electrical engineer says: “Dead battery”
The chemical engineer says: “Impurities in the gasoline”
The IT engineer says: “Hey guys, I have an idea, how about we all get out of the car and get back in”
If that's what the IT guy recommends, how do you get users, never mind corporate managers and executives, to take software system quality seriously? Obviously, this isn't what a proper software guy will think, the proper software guy knows that things are a bit more complex than that. But this is what the software guy communicates to non-technical people. And only a few rare non-technical people will tell the software guy, "OK, look, just tell me what's really going on here, how deep the problem is, and what we need to do to fix it, no matter what it takes." Most people won't have the time for that because fact of the matter is that the system satisfices needs until it doesn't, and then it's too late.
I previously worked in factory automation back when computers were first getting introduced into factories. After I spent a day tracking down and correcting some software glitch that was causing a problem, the factory manager would ask what the problem had been. I was instructed to say "bad valve, we replaced it," which I noticed they found far more satisfying to hear than "software writing to wrong register."
In one of the books I got on technology (early '00s?) there was an anecdote about a computer at a military facility crashing each night (probably in the 70s or 80s). They brought in a consultant to look at it and after an extended period of time looking for the problem in the code, the consultant was staying late in the data center wracking his brain over the problem.
At 10pm, a janitor came in, unplugged the computer, and plugged in his floor clearer, cleaned the floor, and then when done, unplugged the floor cleaner, and plugged the computer back in.
The consultant then suggested using the outlet on the other wall that had a free outlet (and got a 'difficult to unplug' cover for the outlet with the computer).
The next night he stayed late again and the janitor used the outlet on the other wall.
The consultant then told management that the problem had been solved and it was a buffer problem.
There's a book called The Devouring Fungus: Tales of the Computer Age [1] that features a story like this, was that the book?
Apparently there are tons of these stories [2] [3], many of them probably urban legends.
But there was one last year that was definitely real [4], when a cleaner removed power to a freezer holding decades of samples, apparently because they were annoyed by an alarm sound it was making.
Software is more like blueprints/processes for manufacturing. When something doesn't work right it's a yield rate issue. Oops the process failed, try it again.
Software can, and should, also be helpfully smarter. Where there's a chance for invalid inputs, they should be validated. That would help with errors like:
* Authentication failed, check your account credentials.
* Could not connect to remote server.
* Invalid data input, failed to parse around byte/octet 1,234,666, near line 56789 (printable filtered) text: 'Invalid String Example Here'
Yes, those are my take on 'software' versions of the starter, battery, and impurity.
Lots of well written software will do this, mostly good compilers for software.
Poorly written software, often hides these errors if it even collects them at all. PHBs and other less professional people seem allergic to thinking, for them it's easier to call in a specialist or just not do it with the broken tool.
SW engineering is still in its infancy compared to other disciplines that have 100s of years of knowledge accumulated and built into their education process.
SW education is different country to country and institution to institution.
In no other engineering discipline would it be tolerated that you could be self educated. The lack of a standards and governing body that you would be expected to be accredited to is a major gap.
In Europe in order to be called yourself an Engineer you need a Bachelor's Degree as a mininum. If not, it's illegal to work as an Engineer because being one requires civil accountability on casualities. You might work as one only if a colleague at work signs up your project. And, yet, depending on the case your colleague will refuse because he or she would be the one to sue in case of risks.
Not everywhere in Europe. Not in the UK for example.
There is legal accountability though, and a much better understanding of who can be held to blame for what. Software suppliers are pretty much immune to consequences of carelessness.
However, I think the real problem is that software is far more complex than a bridge or a building. IT system have complex hardware (far more complex than any mechanical device) running even more complex software (counting all the layers from OS up). On top of that people (meaning users/buyers) have no idea how to evaluate safety/reliability/security and mostly seem to regard it as a nice to have to be traded off against other nice to haves, not an essential baseline.
Once its implement everyone assumes the computer must be right, and acts accordingly. The presumption that computers are right is even enshrined in UK law (the intent was to stop people getting out of things like speeding tickets by claiming speed cameras where faulty) but I think everyone has come across situations where the final word on a dispute was "the computer says so".
How about the safe code in avionics/nuclear sites, ADA/Spark, Misra C? Not magic or as safe-proof as a physical engineering where it's far easier to guess how a system will behave, OFC, but it's a good start.
In Germany, the protected title Ingenieur is still around but most bachelor degrees in a technical field grant you the right to use it. Whether or not you are one doesn't change the liability situation (although you can't perform certain works at all without). It's not really relevant in software development.
The English term "Engineer" can be used by anybody though.
I think not, because the difference between being an actual one and not it's to spend several years in jail (you and your employer) in case of life or health related damages and harms.
> The IT engineer says: “Hey guys, I have an idea, how about we all get out of the car and get back in”.
I have worked with ECU programming. When test drivers got stuck and called me it was the first thing I told them. "Restart the vehicle". If that didn't work, "disconnect the battery and wait 5 minutes".
2. Early implementations of Britain's TPWS on railways are exactly like this. Suppose you're pulling into a terminus station and, for whatever reason, you happen to stop such that your train's sensors are right on top of the TPWS "toast rack" (basically think radio transmitter). When the next driver turns the train on, it can see a TPWS transmission. Now, it knows perfectly well it isn't moving, so we're not in some terrifying near-death scenario, and it could let you, a human train driver, sort this out by, you know, not crashing the train into the station buffers. Nope, in v1.0 the firmware just considers starting in this situation to be a fatal error and won't let you move at all, the only authorised solution is to get rid of any passengers who've boarded your train, switch the train into it's (unsafe for passenger service) maintenance mode, drive it away from the beacons a few yards, stop, turn off the power, and then reboot the computer where it now can't see a troubling TPWS transmitter and now it's a working train again.
This happened to us with a first model year vehicle multiple times until the dealership received the necessary software upgrades. It was quite frustrating to be stuck at a busy fuel pump for 10 minutes until the software systems restarted properly.
Belief in software glitchiness should have saved these people from erroneous prosecution, but instead what we see is people trusted the computers to be infallible.
No they trusted management to be infallible, even when management couldn't redo the calculations of the software manually.
This sort of thing is inevitable once a company is controlled by people who don't understand what the company does.
Management replaced know-how with software, and it mostly worked. Then they probably fired the few remaining people that had the know-how. Then, when it became painfully clear something was wrong, management chose to blame anyone, including to the point of pursuing prison sentences, rather than admitting they didn't know their business and someone made a mistake. They chose to destroy people's lives rather than admit they couldn't do the ONE job they claim they can.
Ok but, for example, Boeing has recently come under fire for poor quality control, which people are blaming on management decisions taking power away from technical experts.
And the enormous Millennium Tower in San Francisco is sinking and tilting.
This is a British scandal, and we’re quite capable of avoiding consequences for malfeasance in every sector of our economy, not just IT thank you very much.
The Grenfell Tower fire comes to mind, as someone was mentioning above how this sort of stuff rarely happens when it comes to buildings and the like. As far as I know there were no real consequences for the people that were directly responsible for that tragedy.
Some were deregulation, but some were outright deliberate fraud, like when Kingspan and Celotex scammed the test process and produced misleading safety documents to get their flammable insulation used where it wasn't legal.
And local authorities don't come out of it well either - the building was owned and maintained by a local authority, they hired the architects, the design-and-build contractor, and the guy whose job it was to carry out fire risk assessments. And they chose a bidding process that drove the price so low the bidders who wanted to use non-flammable cladding all dropped out.
Definitely need to stricter regulation though - the idea we could trust the construction industry to use flammable cladding safely has proven false. Flammable cladding should be banned on tall buildings all together.
I think we are in agreement. From what I remember, Kingspan changed their formulation and didn't repeat the fire testing.
Again, how is it you are allowed to do your own testing, rather than submit samples regularly to a test house? Or perhaps products on higher risk buildings should be spot checked. A sample from the jobsite itself could be tested.
Well, they did submit samples to a test house - the Buildings Research Establishment - for fire safety testing. And they got safety certifications from independent bodies like LABC.
Just you know, it turns out while the test rigs were being built, the BRE might have looked the other way while someone put fireproof magnesium oxide boards over the temperature sensors.
And when the manufacturer sent 'all the test results' to LABC for the certification, they didn't include the tests that ended in "a raging inferno". You see, that test was terminated early, so it wasn't a completed test. And when the manufacturer got the certificate granted, which included a bunch of caveats about how the material specifically had to be used, they immediately quoted it in their marketing materials without any of those caveats.
Of course all this fraud was done by some 18 year old junior employee, who was told it was 'industry standard behaviour' by a mid-level employee (who has conveniently since died) and the CEO had 'absolutely no idea' this was going on right under his nose.
They're protecting property owners at every step. Why haven't they condemned large/tall buildings with inadaquate stairwells for fire evacuation (in fact, given the timeline of the fire, Grenfell's single staircase would have been amply adaquate to evacuate the building before people started dying)? Because that would totally hose the people who own such buildings. And why aren't they requiring large buildings to have adaquate staircases? Because that would eat into profitable floorspace. The UK prioritizes property owner profit.
> Why haven't they condemned large/tall buildings with inadaquate stairwells for fire evacuation
They kinda have - check out the cladding scandal [1]. It's pretty major, a lot of properties are essentially unmortgageable until they get inspected to make sure they're safe.
Even Facebook realized it was dumb and Mark Zuckerberg apologized to us all on stage at f8 a decade or so ago and said they were now going to say "move fast with stable infra", yet I still see tons of people fetishize and emulate the original.
And even then they didn't pivot to "don't break anything." They still are willing to break user workflows are quickly test new features that have a high risk of being rolled back. They key is that they are able to set more explicit tradeoffs on the risk they want to take relative the benefits and what scenarios they want to optimize. The same applies to all engineering disciplines - arguably managing requirements and tradeoffs to produce a working system is what makes something a work of engineering vs another discipline.
I think one of the issues is that software engineers are building on sand. Civil engineers have Newton and Einstein to fall back on.
It feels like there is no ground truth in computing, each layer has to assume the layer below is generating random errors and try to account for that, because humans are not perfect.
The laws of physics stay the same, technology is constantly changing.
When you get trained as a Chartered Engineer/Surveyor/Accountant/Purchaser etc you get schooled in ethics, professionalism, whistle blowing, how to deal with being unfairly pressurised etc. Never mind Newton, professional standards would have really helped here.
yes, and instead of numerical values that can be corrected with straightforward mathematical techniques, you have contracts (API) that are either broken or not, and theres nothing you can do about it, i mean unless you want to write thousands of extra lines of code to account for every combination of the lower layer misbehaving
> Move fast and break things is not something i wanted to hear tbh.
Moving safely means moving slow, and that costs more - it's as simple as that. Plus it would also automatically disqualify like 80% of the workforce, due to the need for a proper formal education and certification, which would literally paralyze the industry.
And the current solution is not that different from what we have e.g. in civil engineering, the building codes for high-rise buildings are way more strict and complex than the regulations for a garden shed - in many places no permit is needed at all for it. And sometimes that means that that shad will fall in a catastrophic way, too.
In the US, professional engineering licenses tend to be required when you're signing off on things for regulators. Which is common in Civil Engineering and Architects; it's not actually that common with Mechanical Engineers and isn't even available any longer for Software.
But you're right, it generally requires you have a 4-year degree and have worked under a licensed engineer for some number of years.
In Europe it is. At least in potential life endangering environments. Maybe not for a web page for the govermenmt in order to apply for trivial documents such as the national ID; but for stuff like Healthcare backends, any self-called Engineer from the US couldn't even join that project without a Bachelor Degree.
I've worked in this area (in Europe) and that is nonsense. There is no requirement, other thans on the software itself. Bachelor-ish people are generally recruited, but not for their degree, but their skills (and low cost).
It depends on what you mean with 'a lot of places', but coding up healthcare data systems or firmware for devices where you'll have no interaction with patients or hospital, it's the company that's liable.
Them hiring only people with degrees is almost certainly orthogonal to legal requirements in such cases.
Any sort of professional interaction with patients, sure, whole different ballgame.
At the very least qualifications and licensing should be required for anything critical, or for any engineers writing software that does work that would otherwise be done by a legally liable licensed professional.
Components at every stage of the design and manufacturing of a commercial airplane are signed off by licensed engineers who are legally liable for negligence, and yet Boeing could outsource the 737 Max's software to $9/hr programmers in India. Obviously physical engineering failures still happen, but it's ridiculous that there's no liable professional responsible for software that keeps a plane full of hundreds of people from falling out of the sky.
If a licensed accountant was caught lying about hundreds of people stealing from their employer to the point of getting some sent to jail he could easily do jail time for negligence or perjury. Instead some seemingly anonymous dev wrote shoddy software that ruined hundreds of lives and the Post Office gets to just say that the computer did an oopsie.
> Moving safely means moving slow, and that costs more - it's as simple as that. Plus it would also automatically disqualify like 80% of the workforce, due to the need for a proper formal education and certification, which would literally paralyze the industry.
Would that be so bad, in the grand scheme of things?
This isn't a story about software engineering, it's a story about a shitty governmental department in a mediocre country not fixing something that everyone knows is broken, and threatening people with jail time instead.
Show me a similar story about stuff this bad happening at Google and I'll believe that there's something wrong with the field as practiced at its best.
The wider 'mood music' is also key here; the government was in the process of privatizing the Post Office i.e. so that they weren't the sole equity owner. Every decision (or non-decision, more appropriately) stemmed from that.
This is why the CEO was rewarded with a CBE and a cushy NHS post in 2019 when the scandal was in full swing. She was acting like a good girl for her political masters in managing the crisis, stringing it out long enough in the hope that everyone would forget
the software bugged and said they commited fraud, thats still half the problem and is a good time to repeat "stop putting software in things". we still need 40 more years before software "engineers" grow up and start doing things even anything near correctly. the other half of the problem is those people who just want tech for every problem. they just want shiny buttons, regardless of if they work. i dont know why but everything that these companies like fujitsu, hp, dell, acer, asus, sony, samsung, etc are all complete shit. i would vote to remove the government if they told me theyre going to start using some fujitsu product to decide who should go to jail. i just noticed a $6000 vent hood where if you adjust the fan speed you cant toggle the light within the next few seconds. even lay people understand that there is no reason for this aside from what could only be reasonably understood as absolute shit engineering.
the problem is people asking idiots who cant program even a simple button, to program serious enterprise, government, and military systems.
> and yet you don't see very many buildings collapse, bridges fail, and damns flood down valley
Computers, at its best existed for only 200 years. That's counting from the difference engine that Babbage never finished building, and if we are talking about the first modern computer that does contribute significantly in a way, that's around the time ENVAC and Z3 appeared, just around 80 years.
Structural Engineering existed for over 2000 years. With that comes with a lot of people died in natural disasters and advancing material science to improve structural integrity. But even the Japanese to this day still can't solve the earthquake and the problems the fallout makes.
> Why this isn't applied to software engineering is a whole nother story
I actually think it is. That's why real-time operating system and mission-critical hardware exists for human to fly in the air and explore the space, not counting a lot of time-sensitive industry robotics software that controls the actuators in real time as well.
That said, the strict requirements of real-time programming requires a lot of expertise such as CPU cycle counting, CPU slack reduction, timing requirements and choice of algorithm (such as EDF scheduling and real time memory allocators like TLSF, and you won't see jemalloc on embedded devices, right?), stack or heap memory allocation which also complicates the programming stuff, because removing malloc might free you from OOM but this means a lot of functions needs to accept extra parameters to state the output location, and that means a lot of normal software can't be used. (You can go for a hybrid approach by using arena allocation, but that still isn't a perfect solution)
As you see, even for soft real time engineering (which I actually mentioned so far, I don't know much about the real hardcore "hard real time engineering" though), the sheer complexity here already, means there's a lot of design decisions which simply just makes people stay away and just go for normal software engineering (but in the end, if everything is predicable its fine).
> Move fast and break things is not something i wanted to hear tbh.
When Zuckerberg said that, he's referring to his startup mindset when Facebook was really just a startup in his day. In a highly competitive market environment, startups has to fight desperately for their own survival, even with lots of fundings and VC rounds.
Startup can move very fast and their agility is the only weapon against the old dogs. Now you've become one of the old dogs, you don't break things.
Also for much of that 2000 years, most bridges that weren't big landmarks were somewhat consumable. It's not uncommon in small towns in Europe to have the bridge from the first half of the twentieth century, built because the nineteenth century bridge washed away in a storm, and that bridge was built because the seventeenth century bridge fell down from lack of maintenance.
That wasn't the issue for the brige, but from centuries old idiotic people founding villages near a river or stray with names like "Villar del rio" (village of -by- the river). At least that's the case of Spain. Then floods happened really often, and everyone ranted on the supposed bad materials.
> Why this isn't applied to software engineering is a whole nother story, but i think it probably should.
Because bits don‘t rot and while you need to build a new bridge now and then which will include your learnings from the old one, you never have to replace software because it can be copied ad infinitum.
> and yet you don't see very many buildings collapse, bridges fail, and damns flood down valley.
Hi! Let me tell you about my wonderful country. Norway! I'm sure you've heard about it. The socialist utopia in Scandinavia! ;-)
The Braskereidfoss dam failed during a flood last fall. Luckily just a 'river dam' and not a reservoir dam. Still rather bad.
Oh, and during the same freak whether event, but different place in the country. The Randklev railway bridge failed over the river Lågen, just by Ringebu.
And during the last 8 years, we've had two road bridges collapse. One by Sjoa in 2016 (Perkolo bridge) and then 16 months ago Tretten bridge. We had the fantastic idea of building wooden bridge sfor road traffic. Here's a nice article on Tretten bridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tretten_Bridge
But yeah, not too many building collapses . Just a bunch of infrastructure collapse.
It’s that way because software is much much much more complex than that.
Building is a good example. One architect after university has enough knowledge and mental capability to design a building that won’t topple: There are discrete number of parameters to work on and fallible elements are identified and understood very well. There’s manageable amount of degrees of freedom that architect is working with. It’s also not very common for physics to get an annual update.
But when you go to funny-cat-pictures.com there are layers upon layers of complexity. There’s TCP, UDP, traffic encryption, indefinite number of hoops in routing, indefinite number of electronic devices with various quality, etc. Request comes happens from millions lines of code operating system and generation happens on a different millions lines of code of operating system with thousands of lines of codes of software code that interacts with databases, proxies, CDNs, load balancers and is templating, serving, translating, transpiling, compiling and serving while defending against adverse attacks, managing the cache, optimizing for network topology and requester rendering software. That changes every single day slightly.
In 99% the worst case is - your picture won’t load. But when you get to the more serious software development (in a way that it’s critical domain, not that “serve cat pictures” isn’t serious job, mind you) all of it is very very visible.
Every element is so unimaginably complex that it has literal tomes of knowledge written and published about it. Describing every element of transaction between end user and cat serving website would take hundreds of pages - and it would be different than other cat website.
Most of the building, bridges etc. was made either by one person or small group of people working on it.
Rarely software is written seldom, and many well known products have tens of thousands of inconceivable smart engineers and we still can make fun of their - not so rare - failures.
So yeah. Systems suck, organizations suck, people suck. But they suck in relatively safe but also complex environment.
For years software engineering was made fun of because it’s not real engineering. But when you look close enough the environment is orders of magnitude more difficult. Civil engineers might be offended but they can’t hold a candle to structures software is keeping straight.
Software is a bridge built on a raft, floating on an ocean, which tries to get shot down by armed pirates and semi-controlled by a cost-saving manager trying to look good in annual progress report.
> Why this isn't applied to software engineering is a whole nother story, but i think it probably should.
Money, for one thing. Actually building the thing IRL is the expensive bit, but it's effectively free for software. So engineers are incentivised to get things right the first time, and software developers are not. It's much cheaper to skimp on QA, let users find your fuck-ups, and push an update.
When software breaks you restart and it's back to "working" order. It would be a different scenario if the computer would set itself on fire on failure.
It's easier for software to have a catastrophic failure than a building, bridge, or dam. It's not really a fair comparison when those are like easy mode compared to software.
I don't think it's "easy mode" and more that they're just very different domains.
As time goes on, I feel more and more strongly that we shouldn't compare software engineering with other types of engineering at all. My younger brother works in the structural engineering space and the types of issues he's faced across different roles is very different to the types of issues I face in software.
Building design and construction have to handle the physical world and dealing with the realities of physically building the structure. Once it's built, however, the occupants don't make drastic changes to the building itself. In comparison, something like Facebook or Twitter needed to change drastically just to remain usable as they grew. "Just stop adding users" isn't a sensible solution to the problem.
Just to be clear that I do not excuse the, frankly, shit software design of Horizon and the fucking appalling behaviour of the Post Office throughout this scandal. I do think, however, that comparing software engineering the other types of engineering does a disservice to all and doesn't take us closer to actually improving the craft.
I've got ~15 years of software development under my belt. And I've also experienced a 2ish year stint where I was exposed to a lot of structural engineering.
The structural engineers take a piece of steel out into the desert and they dump sand on it until it collapses. Then they divide whatever weight the sand was by 3 and write it down into a book which is then published for all the other structural engineers. This type of steel with this type of configuration with this length can hold up to this much weight.
Meanwhile, in software engineering the limiting factor that prevents collapse is often "these sets of constraints and requirements are too complicated for the team to keep track of in their heads in this messy codebase". Not only do we not have a way to test this and publish the results, it's not even obvious what exactly you're even trying to measure.
[Cyclomatic complexity isn't very well correlated to defects (iirc lines of code is better correlated). Design patterns, best practices, and code smells are all just poetry that we use to story tell our ways out of blame. And Weyuker's 9 Properties are at best a waste of time. There is currently no way to measure bad code that fails under load until it does so in production.]
> There is currently no way to measure bad code that fails under load until it does so in production.
FWIW, techniques to perform such measures have existed for ~30 years in PL research (some of Rust's type system comes from this kind of research), but I don't know of any industrial code that makes use of it.
So far the only[] thing I've found was Weyuker's 9 Properties from measurement theory, and that did not seem particularly compelling.
Now, I get that linear/affine types and dependent types (and theorem provers, etc) can be used to prove that you're following the spec. But this doesn't prove that the code is easily comprehended by the people interacting with it. Code that is provably correct (even in the event where the spec is actually exactly what you want) can still fail because it's too complicated for anyone to modify it anymore.
For example, the function composition operator type in agda is kind of intimidating:
_∘_ : ∀ {a b c}
{A : Set a} {B : A → Set b} {C : {x : A} → B x → Set c} →
(∀ {x} (y : B x) → C y) → (g : (x : A) → B x) →
((x : A) → C (g x))
It looks like Camelot is just a variant of SML. I couldn't really find any information about Hobbes (at least, what I found is probably not what you're talking about).
Can you mention the features of these languages that you think are worth looking into?
Both of them use linear types and something kinda vaguely like Rust move semantics (and, in the case of Hobbes, time & space sandboxes) to guarantee statically that code will execute within given time and/or space bounds. I also wrote (~20 years ago) an extension of Erlang that could do something similar (for small subsets of Erlang).
Granted, this doesn't fulfill all the requirements for being resilient, but if we manage to make it usable (let's say as usable as Rust), it would be a pretty large step forward.
The unfortunate reality is that everyone else has accepted that they are software engineers. That unfortunately trumps what "real" software engineers think.
You've been downvoted by people who value the word "engineer" in their job title even though they haven't earned it. The title is valued because real engineers have earned a great deal of respect through their diligence, and software "engineers" are for the most part parasites leeching off that respect earned by others.
Yes. I come from a country where 'engineer' (German: 'Ingenieur') is a title with strict requirements by law. You cannot just call yourself 'engineer' without the appropriate degree or certificates.
These people have been called 'software developers' or just 'programmers' back in the day. In fact, I'd argue that most commercial software development is more like plumbing than engineering.
Here's a hint: if you're writing control software for airplanes, medical devices or industrial plants, you're an engineer; if you're developing a UI frontend for a website, you're probably not.
I downvoted because this sanctification of engineering (guild, not practice) is as tedious as the idea that credentialing is a silver bullet for software quality.
I've worked on enough projects with "real engineers" to see that rigor varies significantly with the person. e.g. I've seen a dropout with more engineering rigor than a Waterloo grad (granted, this was at a company with a very selective interview process...)
In practice, you do whatever and then pay a licensed PE with an absolutely massive liability insurance policy to stamp your design. If something goes wrong, they take the fall and go sip drinks on a beach somewhere.
and yet you don't see very many buildings collapse, bridges fail, and damns flood down valley. The idea is that there should be liability assigned to important systems, for which this liability makes the onus on the creator/owner to build in safe guards, checks or other protections to prevent disasters.
Why this isn't applied to software engineering is a whole nother story, but i think it probably should. Move fast and break things is not something i wanted to hear tbh.