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Comment by vonmoltke | Hacker News Reader

Alternately, the software industry could go the way of the electrical and mechanical engineering industries and just not hire people unless they already possess relevant domain knowledge. It was a bit of a shock to me when I transitioned from EE that I could get hired in this industry with little to no domain knowledge on what I was being hired to do.

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I do wonder if this will happen. I reckon there will be some sort of catastrophic programming error which brings in a level of certification akin to other engineering disciplines. I've seen jobs advertised nearby for a nuclear defence company that have the same requirements as a web dev agency.

The only question is whether you will be hired on those requirements alone.

You mean like a company on this list?

https://www.dontbankonthebomb.com/nuclear-weapon-producers/

(It seems to be an activist site, but it's what shows up when you search for producers of of nuclear weapons.)

Most of these companies are huge. They may be looking for someone to maintain their canteens' web site. Or something else not very exciting.

So, kind of like a software bug that causes 1 or 2 planes to crash, killing all on-board?

Or killed a bunch of people undergoing radiotherapy, or exploded an Arianne rocket, or required years of remiedial work before 1st of Jan 2000 ... the list goes on and on.

I was thinking something more extreme, although I wonder if that software bug had caused a plane or two to crash into a US city would there have been more of a response.

Learning is a prerequisite, jobs pivot, things change

Maybe in another hundred years things'll settle down

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