I imagine that amazon would still grill you in an interview even if you have one of their advance AWS certificates. I know those certificates are not the same, but I don't think it's about certifications.

Yes and depending on the field, you may have to do mandatory additional certification and training throughout your career.

We have certs in software engineering, but in my experience, they've largely failed as an indicator of qualifications. Some hiring managers see them as nice to have, but I've also met hiring managers who are actively skeptical of certifications.

We also don't have differentiation of software levels or skills. If you're a programmer, you could, in theory, go program anything from web to AI to robotics. You don't have to be certified to work in nearly any industry. And we don't have formal hierarchy of skilled work, such as EMTs, nurses and doctors.

We're a relatively young industry that just hasn't worked things out yet and, to be honest, in the United States, there isn't pressure by employers to get our act together. The engineers themselves are in charge often and we're skeptical of boards and authority. We have too many stories of folks making it big with no formal education. Those with the money aren't demanding change because the current system "works."

It's possible software engineering will someday evolve into a boring respectable profession, but right now it's still a creative field of fads, trends, rock stars and super stars (let alone ninjas and wizards).

FYI 'real' engineering (electrical, mechanical, civil etc. ) do have certification exams in USA and many other countries

You should write for Grey's Anatomy. That sounds like one of their ridiculous plot lines.

Some nursing boards pretty much have this; you get to a room with a medical actor that's behaving like a patient with X issue and you have to handle the situation.

It's also a big part of residency (having to treat patients with diminishing supervision from senior doctors). So it's not that far fetched.

With medicine there are probably like 4 ways to treat a bullet wound. If you go too far outside of that you're probably not a good doctor.

With software you can write a TODO app with a million lines of code or 7.

Realistically, I think I'd not be allowed to practice with that kind of system. I suspect there's an entire class of programmer (maybe this is the dev vs eng distinction the article refers to) which would be excluded by a system like this.

Fundamentally though I think that system of high priests and laypeople who are barely allowed to code at all can't be sustained. I strongly suspect all professions will eventually require a little programming, and certification will be hard for those cases.

I would likely take issue with whatever criteria people chose for judging someone's software engineering ability. Creating the best performing system is rarely anyone's goal (not that performance should be discounted,) they want to make something with the hard to quantify qualities of robustness, scalability, maintainability and expandability, to different degrees. They also often want to use languages or frameworks (or supporting software like databases) based on what boils down to fashion. Often the most desirable quality for candidates is an ability to learn and leverage new tools, given varied and shifting standards of good design, which again is hard to quantify.

Given the amount of people with CS degrees who fail the most basic interviews, it would be hard to set something good up. I assume universities are trying to solve the same problems as the hypothetical board setting up this test.

That, and the field moving so quickly and being so broad. I interview for ML. I assume interviews for front end are extremely different.

Disclaimer: I’m educated as a technologist not an engineer in Canada.

This exists in Canada for some areas of software development that falls under the requirements of being a licensed software engineer.

Many people, including CS graduates in Canada, think it’s ridiculous. The requirement for certification is pretty strict in that you need a computer engineering undergrad degree or a degree in software engineering from an accredited program. This is probably how most people would be accredited, but there are some other ways too. All of them, as far as I can gather, require formal educational credentials.

You then need to go through a formal apprenticeship while working under someone who is licensed. It’s probably an 8 year process in total.

Further to that, there is a limitation on what you can practice. There are different disciplines (e.g., mechanical, civil, electrical) and there are fields and scopes of practice within each of those disciplines. What this results in is someone who is licensed in, for example, embedded systems wouldn’t then be able to go and work on websites or back end databases.

The field is further divided into technologists and technicians that require less education than engineers and have much less autonomy and scope of authority.

Bad doctor is relative. I expect that most doctors who have pass through that gauntlet can pass the doctor equivalent of fizzbuzz, which already is a lot different than our industry.

It's quite hard to be really bad physician - because Pareto principle applies to medicine. As far as I remember, 5 autoimmune diseases (of >120 described; ~4%) make up for 80% of total autoimmune diseases. My relative did research on kidney diseases and results were similar.