Iron Ring Ceremony

I guess I’m going to have to get used to wearing jewelry. 🙂 The Iron Ring ceremony was last night and I have a pinky ring on my left hand. For those that don’t know, engineers in Canada wear the ring to symbolize their obligations to the engineering profession and to society.

The ceremony made me reflect about what it means to be an engineer in the software industry. I think our project management professor said it best when he compared software engineering to early civil engineering. A lot of bridges fell down for hundreds of years but over time things matured. For better or worse, they don’t make us stand under our “bridges” any more when the first heavy load passes over them.

So even though our lives are safe these days, software engineers shouldn’t fall back on the fact that the profession is new as an excuse to make poor software. Like the civil engineering profession did, they should continue to improve the quality of the software they write and the processes they use to write it.