Your Stake

One of the consequences of being a professional engineer is that you can be held personally liable for the work your company performs under your signature. Courts in the United States have held that only members of a profession can be found guilty of malpractice.^[18] Doctors, lawyers, and architects can be guilty of malpractice. Garbage truck drivers, short order cooks, and computer programmers cannot be guilty of malpractice because, legally, they aren't considered to be professionals. By establishing software engineering as a profession, we are paving the way for the courts to find that software engineers can be held liable for malpractice just like other professionals. On the other hand, following commonly accepted engineering practices could be a defense in some cases.

No individual engineer will be required to be licensed, but some companies eventually will be required to employ licensed engineers. The companies most likely to be required to employ professional engineers include companies that:

• Sell software engineering services to the public

• Perform software work for public agencies

• Produce safety-critical software

Other companies may voluntarily employ professional engineers to take advantage of the marketing cachet of hiring workers with the best available credentials or because they see hiring professional engineers as a way to strengthen their technical talent pool. Hiring software engineers who have obtained certification but not professional engineering status might serve these companies' interests about as well.

Professional engineers in these companies will review software engineering work and sign off on the software their companies deliver. To those companies, employing professional engineers will be a legal necessity. If software companies follow other engineering disciplines, the company that hires a professional engineer will pay for liability insurance as part of the professional engineer's employment package, which will minimize that disadvantage of getting your professional engineering license.

Professional engineers will gain other benefits. The professional engineers who put their signature and reputation on the line for their companies will have final say over methodology choices, design approaches, and other decisions that affect the quality of the software for which they might be held liable. Without professional standing, your boss can come to you and demand that you commit to an unrealistic schedule, make shortsighted design compromises, or sacrifice quality in order to get the software out the door. With a well-defined profession consisting of education, a code of ethics, and licensing you will be able to say, "The standards of my profession don't allow me to shortchange quality in this situation. I could lose my license or get sued." You will have a professional and legal basis for standing up to unenlightened managers, marketers, and customers a basis that is sorely lacking today.

At the organizational level, we may see an interplay between an organization's SW-CMM rating (discussed in Chapter 14) and the professional engineering license. Professional engineers will potentially be liable for the software written under their supervision. Professional engineers won't be able to personally review every line of code on large projects. Even if the organization pays for professional engineers' liability policy, I think that professional engineers will generally want to work for organizations in which they receive the best technical and process support, in other words, which have the most sophisticated software organizational infrastructure. I predict that we'll see a concentration of professional engineers in organizations that have achieved higher SW-CMM levels. This will reinforce the phenomenon that Harlan Mills observed 20 years ago: above-average developers tend to cluster in effective organizations and below-average developers in ineffective organizations.^[19]