It’s astounding that we, as an industry, are so averse to licensing developers. It solves the resume spam problem and the repetitive LeetCode round(s) that every company now wants. We also don’t have to settle for the licensing process other industries have—ours can be more inclusive of alternative development backgrounds, while still providing a meaningful quality filter.
Our industry is one where actual skills should and do matter, and much gatekeeping has been reduced.
Professional rote learning is great for mandarin jobs where you are working within a static prescribed framework (legal, accounting, building codes). It is terrible for jobs that require professional taste.
Tell me how you would create a license for a graphic designer or UX specialist.
I actually fail to understand idealists that believe that licensing might even work. Who are y'all?
> Our industry is one where actual skills should and do matter [...] Professional rote learning is great for mandarin jobs where you are working within a static prescribed framework (legal, accounting, building codes).
Saying things like this reflects poorly on our community and demonstrates a poor understanding on how much creativity and thought goes into legal and accounting. There's a reason there is a large pay band for lawyers and accountants.
> Creativity and thought going into accounting ought to be illegal
Our society is poor at creating scales and then selecting a cutoff point for illegality. There are 0b10 types of people: binary thinkers and grey area thinkers.
All-or-nothing thinking (often also referred to as ‘black and white thinking’, ‘dichotomous thinking’, ‘absolutist thinking’, or ‘binary thinking’) is a common form of cognitive distortion or ‘unhelpful thinking style’. People who think in all-or-nothing terms may also act in equivalently extreme ways. They may veer, for example, between complete abstinence and ‘binges’, or between extreme effort and none.
Nope nothing wrong about it at all. Some company’s may structure their business in certain ways to take various trade offs, exactly how software devs make certain trade offs. Then of course there’s shady and illegal stuff you’re getting at, but that’s a separate topic.
yeah I had a MSCE, I took it off my resume, I think most people with qualifications use it to show they've reached the minimum level. It doesn't show you're in the top 10% or even top 50%.
The paper ceiling is a silly gatekeeping done by those who have made it.
I would be in favor of licensing knowing it would probably exclude me unless of course it does not require a university degree. I was not born into a family of means and being autodidactic allowed me to excel beyond my upbringing.
The best path would be to have journeyman type of pathway.
Basically you find a grad right now and make them do a coding test. Something is broken there.
A degree could include the vocational qualification as a 1 year study, but having the vocation qualification alone would save youngsters a lot of money and reduce the burden on hiring. You could even still interview coding questions but the application process can remove the spam/ai bullshit to some extent. "Can they code?" is answered.
What percentage of what you do as a software engineer has direct linkage to computer science?
My guess for most of us is "not very much at all", several of the best people I've worked with as programmers did not have a CS degree, and I've interviewed people with CS degrees who could not write a function to sum an array of integers in any language of their choosing, meaning "honoring their degree" would have been an unwise choice.
What does solving random puzzles from Leetcode have to do with day-to-day engineering work? IMHO, the emphasis should be on previous experience, CS domain knowledge and systems architecture / design. Maybe degrees need to be fixed to convey more useful knowledge...
Yep, I've talked about this at length for years. We need to bring back the PE Exam to help guarantee some minimal level of competency in prospective applicants.
But this is one of the most entitled industries in the universe. Even the mere notion of suggesting academic degrees, PE Exams and other forms of "gatekeeping" is tantamount to shouting Voldemort's name through a megaphone.
To be fair, there is a very good case for ignoring applications that list different certifications if you’re hiring. I fear the same would logic would apply to licensing.
