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Comment by 10000truths | Hacker News Reader

Why would you want a license? The whole allure of software development is in its accessibility, that it's easy to get started with nothing more than a laptop and an Internet connection. Putting up artificial barriers to entry is anathema to that. What you'll end up with, in practice, is one of two outcomes:

1. A race to the bottom where licenses become easier and easier to get, until it becomes no more a demonstration of competence than drivers' licenses are to one's driving skills.

2. Protectionist policies make licenses mandated and difficult to obtain, then the talent pool and innovation moves to places that don't require that license.

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By license I mean the current Leetcode interview process except you do it once and are good for at least five years. Obviously when candidates are interviewed there would still be technical questions asked, but perhaps those would be more domain-specific. The whole point is to avoid the redundancy of the existing interview process.

> By license I mean the current Leetcode interview process except you do it once and are good for at least five years

Some companies do seem to be offering something similar to this, see CodeSignal's general coding assessment or back when TripleByte was big a few years ago. I think the problem is that even within the specialized topic of LC style interviews, many companies don't agree on a similar strategy when it comes to types of questions and difficulty. There isn't one standard that every company agrees on, so most have their own flavor of it.

Yea, think of it less as a "government issued license allowing you to do software" and more of a certificate that says "I recently passed a level $LEVEL leetcode grind, you only need to test me for specialized skills or for a level greater than $LEVEL." If it actually worked and couldn't be gamed/cheated (good luck with that), it could reduce interviews to a simple check of domain knowledge not covered by the certificate.

It is already a massive waste of human potential to overstress leetcodes.

I'd rather have candidates studying unit test design, debugging, security hardening, technical writing, localization, or pretty much anything else that comes up more often in practical development.

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