Indeed, it’s a shame that the industry still has no licensing program, like all the real professions such as law, medicine, and the trades.
Professional licensing is pure economic protectionism and largely fails at the stated goal of promoting safety, quality, or professionalism. It is prone to corruption, as all human ventures with absolute power and authority will be
Voluntary trade organizations, certifications and other methods are far superior to governmental professional licensing
Citations?
> Voluntary trade organizations, certifications and other methods
The software industry barely even has those.
> The software industry barely even has those.
And no accountability.
When a building collapses engineers form committees and seek the cause and check to see if any engineers were to blame. When a hospital gets hacked and private patient details are made public there are no such enquiries. The computer programmers responsible for creating insecure systems are not held to account.
The upshot is civil engineers get to do a good job. If they cut corners it has real word effects and they get punished.
Computer programmers never get held to account so their managers insist on minimum viable products being promoted irresponsibly into vulnerable systems that expose people's data. If we cut corners it has real world effects and every body blames the users.
So we never (mēh, not often) get to to good work
Ethics are a double edged sword.
Not only are you held to account but you can hold others to account.
In fact, it's an argument that many other professions aren't actually benefiting from licensing, either.
It ain't broke.
Citations?
edit: I found this “The effectiveness of licensing” [1], which suggests replacing licensing with mandatory registration programs (or suggestions of improvements for licensing boards).
I’d be curious to see any research that advocates for removal of licensing without the addition of something else.
Combination of this there are several licensed FL contractors currently being investigated for Fraud because they promised Homeowers work they never delivered. The Trades are FULL of licensed scam artists
Building Contractors are by far the best example I could give.
Personally I do not want to get to a situation where my Open Source Code is downloaded by someone in say California and the next thing I know I am being arrested for "Developing with out a license"
Hell if there was a License requirement for development when I was a teen I likely would have never learned how to develop code in the first place, I though HN was all about equality seems odd you would promote blocking out people and only allowing in the elite.
Here is your $25 pi to learn to code on, but if you want to release your code you must first pay thousands of dollars and get approval from the code guild.... No thanks
[1]https://nbc-2.com/news/local/charlotte-county/2022/10/08/roo...
There are cadres of people that struggle through medical licensing just for the chance to make less money than an unlicensed software engineer.
I can only imagine that licensing (or some functionally equivalent regulatory mechanism) would boost the quality of the labor pool.
> I though HN was all about equality seems odd you would promote blocking out people and only allowing in the elite.
You may not be aware of this, but there are a wide variety of ways for people to get into STEM or medicine without being an elite.
Heck, there’s billboards showcasing the non-elites being given free access to Harvard training.
> The Trades are FULL of licensed scam artists
Take a look at that research article that I linked in my parent comment.
It identifies some suggestions for how to fix the situation by switching to a mandatory registration program, instead of licenses, or how to fix the licensing boards so that they properly punish incompetence or other professional failings.
Frech's "Competition & Monopoly in Medical Care" says the original motivation for licensing doctors was driving the Jewish and Black doctors out of the profession.
https://www.amazon.com/Competition-Monopoly-Medical-Care-Fre...
Today, the motivation is to restrict the number of physicians in order to increase their pay.
I don’t find that to be interesting, sorry.
https://www.amazon.com/Competition-Monopoly-Medical-Care-Fre...
Law enforcement embraces rehabilitation, prevention, and other mechanisms as well as simple punishment.
Seems rather disingenuous to make a claim that negative reinforcement doesn’t work, vis-a-vis not having to be in jail.
Besides, pickpockets used to be hanged. Didn't stop them.
What has contributed to safety was no-fault attempts to find out what went wrong.
The reason is simple. Punishment means the person who made the mistake becomes highly motivated to cover it up, deny it, shift blame, and not fix it (because fixing it means admission of, and liability for a mistake).
No fault means that people can fix it without fear.
Destroying people for making mistakes is a really, really bad idea for improving safety.
For user "spying", the code of ethics could contain something like "respecting the user" (idk, just spitballing) and those who want to implement more "spying" into their software could be "disbarred" for unethical behavior. This is even mentioned in the IEEE text: "Approve software only if they have a well-founded belief that it [...] does not [...] diminish privacy".
I guess you could codify this into law (i.e. GDPR style), but even that (at least to my understanding) does not hold developers individually responsible, but their company. E.g. when google gets fined, the developers who created the code are less likely to think "this is bad, therefore I will restrain for doing such things in the future" and more "how close to breaking the law can I push without the company getting in trouble".