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Basically everything about that idea is bad. It will turn into a cash grab, encourage pointless gatekeeping, allow some group to exert outsized control over a diverse trade, and anyway would never get universally adopted. And if it did happen, instead of people selectively spending their time to interview at companies they want to, they'd be forced to waste their time proving whatever the governing body thinks they need to demonstrate. Bringing some artificial barrier to entry to software development is the last thing the field needs.

All of those bad things only happen when the licensing body lobbies to get laws requiring the license. As long as the license is required, it wouldn't have any of those effects, because then you could get a job with someone who doesn't require a license.

This system already exists for the vast majority of real engineering, it's called the PE exam. I see no reason why we couldn't implement something similar in software engineering. It's not like it would keep you from being able to get a job as a code monkey working on Wordpress sites, but it would help in guaranteeing minimum levels of competency in the fundamentals of computer science.

We have university degrees which consist of numerous exams and we know they don't work to guarantee technical skills. The industry changes too quickly for curriculums to keep up, the field is vastly too large to cover adequately in one package, and testing well doesn't translate effectively to programming well.

Why would this hypothetical certification not have the same problems?

Universities have an incentive to pass you, and never claim to teach you technical skills -- they teach you theory.

This would be different because they would have an incentive to be an accurate measure of ability so that companies would continue to require them. Presumably the big companies would constantly contribute to the curriculum, and the small companies would then benefit from that.

Medicine and the law are constantly changing, and somehow those licensing exams stay up to date. I assume the same methods could be used.

> When you apply for a job as a doctor, they don't make you demonstrate surgical techniques. They take your board certification and ask you questions about what you've done in the past, things that went wrong and what you learned from that experience, and so on. They just assume you have the technical skills if you have the license.

That's when you already worked as a surgeon in a reputable hospital. The same way, the technical screens (leetcode) is generally minimal for hires that have demonstrated a clear pattern of success at reputable companies.

> We need an industry agreed-upon certification exam.

We already mostly do: proper CS/Engineering degrees have a pretty good signal to noise ratio for hiring.

Companies won't share their stats, but they know which schools and programs to target. Real engineering departments typically have job placement rates near 100%.

We already have the problem of people who are good at grinding LeetCode and passing FAANG interviews, but terrible at actual software engineering. And the inverse.

Why would this not just transfer to the certification process?

Usually you have to have an internship before taking a certification exam. I assume the same would be required here.

Are you saying a higher percentage of good swe’s could not pass a LC interview with prep then can pass, but are terrible swe?

As someone who has seen my share of “paper tigers” - people that either memorize enough to pass a certification or find brain dumps online. Certifications are useless and easily gamed. This has been true sense at least 2000.

When I was working in the “real world” (I’m in consulting now), I could tell the people who just studied for a cert within the first 5 minutes of an interview.

Most industry cert exams require internships before taking the exam. It could work like that.

I agree with you that most certs suck and are meaningless, but there are a few that are actually hard to get and meaningful.

>We need an industry agreed-upon certification exam

I'd be OK with this if all the answers were just shown to various companies so they could see strengths and weaknesses. If some company doesn't care about DP or low level OO design they can throw out those scores, etc.

I certainly got annoyed in my last job hunt where I had to answer some basic whiteboard easy level LC questions over and over and over. Thank god I got to skip the Google screen. If one more person made me do basic BFS or something I was going to freak out. I understand why they asked it, but I had to keep coding it over and over and over...

Law and medical licensing both require showing basic proficiency in all areas. I don't see why we wouldn't do the same, and then let you get specialization afterwards.

Sure basic proficiency is fine but how do you decide who is worth 150k and who is worth 400k?

Experience. Ask them about previous situations and what they did in them, what they learned from them, what they built, etc.

But it lets you skip the basic coding exams about data structures and OOP.

Let's be honest, you're not choosing 150K vs 400K based on how well they can reverse a binary tree.

I wouldn’t hire anyone who couldn’t reverse a binary tree (with a bit of coaching is fine too). I can certainly understand why someone without white board experience would initially freak out and assume it’s difficult but I’m confident I could ease some panic and point them in a reasonable direction.

We’re talking like 4 loc here…

But there are absolutely people with the title of senior engineer who cannot understand the concept of swapping some pointers and recursion.

Of course you wouldn't. But with a certification exam that included such things, you wouldn't have to ask.

And more importantly, like I said, you aren't choosing their salary and job level based on those skills. You're choosing it based on their experience.

The few skills that are transferable across the whole industry are a tiny part of what it takes to do many jobs, especially more senior IC roles. There is no certification that is possible.

I think you vastly overestimate the skills that are necessary for most jobs.

Also, it should be noted that Amazon and Google don't interview for specific jobs -- they interview you for a job at the company and then you get placed. That would imply that at least at Google and Amazon, the skills are transferable across everything they do.

In other words, if I need those skills, the people doing most jobs are unsuitable.

Doctors and lawyers are legally required to have licenses. This is not the same as a certification (which is legally optional). The argument for doctors/lawyers requiring licensing is that they deal with the public who are not trained in evaluation. That doesn't really apply to companies hiring engineers, so who exactly are we protecting here?

>We need an industry agreed-upon certification exam.

I'm an actuary who had to take 10 of these for my profession (pass rates 20%-40% each sitting, takes 4 months to study for each one).

They come with the same complaints about false negatives, unrealistic/random questions, and fairness that technical interviews have.

Ok, but at least you only had to do each one once, and not repeat those tests for every job interview.

To do the ten exams is ~3,000 hours of studying. A typical job interview is, say, 6 hours. So that's equivalent to 500 job interviews. Now I suppose if you job hop A LOT then you could reach that number but I expect for most people it's not going to happen. I'm about halfway done with my career and have had <50 interviews.

How about LinkedIn certificates? Last I checked Triplebyte has a certification you can put on your LinkedIn if you do well enough on their process.

100% agree. I think we should have a specialization of the PE exam specifically for software engineering.

Its called fizzbuzz.

Anything more complex than that is probably job specific anyways.