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Comment by intrasight | Hacker News Reader

It totally could be solved. Make it a licensed profession. Make it like the legal practice where you have to go to school for 3 years and then pass a test to get your license. Only half joking.

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agree with testing and licensing (and unionizing) but is there any particular reason people should have to go to school? one of the great things about the software industry is that anyone can teach themselves and make a healthy career out of it - would be a shame to add what might be an unnecessary gatekeeping requirement to one of the last few accessible career-paths with upward class mobility

The sad and ironic part is that additional gatekeeping won't produce better results anyway.

I think the results would be better as all practitioners would be well-versed in theory and practice. And of someone pitched a very novel approach, it would get more scrutiny. Of course we should be open to new approaches - just not for the sake of it being new.

I don't agree because current graduates aren't necessarily well-versed in theory and practice. In fact I've worked with CS graduates that don't understand theory at all and follow the worst conceivable practice. Of course CS education isn't standardized and I'm not talk about Stanford grads here. But I have a hard time believing that simply erecting barriers that require education will improve the situation when a lot of educated people still have no idea what they're doing.

The same question/discussion happens in the legal profession - and they have largely settled on the answer being "yes, you have to go to school"

IMHO, you can't have one (testing and licensing) without the other.

I've worked with plenty of educated developers who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. One of our local universities has a shockingly bad program that's reproducing their own unique little brand of terrible bullshit. I've spent half my career fixing the messes they leave behind at various companies in the area.

I think left to our own engineers would have resolved to something like this already. The issue as I see it is corporations and business people have taken over the leadership of this trade to rake in money regardless of what it does to the real world.

And why wouldn't they you can create a problem out of thin air, solve the problem poorly selling the solution, and then when your rushed, half assed and bad solution has issues, you can simply sell the fix to that as well.

I doubt we will see much progress in the quality and rigor of software engineering in the near term, it will need to take a shift from making money in the short term at any cost to making a quality product. Instead we see the same thing happening to other industries so I hold little hope in the near term.

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