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Comment by meowmeowwoof | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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