One thing that I always thought would really help, which "senior developers" as a group seem to be largely against, would be a basic competency test like the medical board exam or law bar exam. Do it once, and demonstrate that you can know some minimum standard amount of knowledge and can do the bare minimum of software development. It wouldn't test every development skill out there. It wouldn't test particular language competency. It wouldn't test for business domain knowledge. And it would not replace the interview or prove that you were the right fit for any particular job. But it could weed out 90% of the fakers who literally cannot program or know nothing about software that all the hiring managers in these threads are complaining about. It would help to prevent our current mess where every company in the world has to waste time doing FizzBuzz again and again for every candidate.

I don't understand why we are against this basic, minimal gate. We have this unreasonable fear of regulation and gatekeeping in our profession, which is ultimately to everyone's collective detriment. I'm not calling for 20,000 pages of federal regulations on software engineering. A minimal gate. Nobody benefits from the current world where anyone with no knowledge or skills can simply claim to be a software engineer. Nobody except the fakers.