How do we let someone fly hundreds of people through the upper atmosphere with a certificate, but you can't make a login page with javascript without a unique multi-day interview for each distinct company?
1 is obvious: if you need JS devs, most hiring managers won't want to hire Pascal devs and hope they figure it out. We can question the wisdom of this, but it is the reality.
2 is less obvious but not super obscure. Depending on how you structure your teams, similar positions at different companies might require more full-stack knowledge, or better people skills, or something else. IME there is little to no standardization here for developer roles, especially compared to something like HR or Accounts Payable, or even very similar IT-adjacent industries like game development.
Fix both of these issues and we would be able to have something more like a formal apprentice/journeyman/master system for various classes of software developer. As it is, each role actually is pretty much totally unique, at least compared to similar roles in other companies (there tends to be more standardization within the same company).
That said, at least with airplanes you have to put in the flight hours and they have to be documented. Most commercial pilots start off at very low pay doing puddle jumpers and regional jets. Military experience might give you a leg up because it shows you've spent a lot of hours going through a very regimented program.
My dad was fortunate to get in the industry right before it became an option for the masses rather than luxury and business. It was high paying, glamorous job.
Every website stack, and the level of complexity under it, is unique, and there's also a huge pay differential.
*could be false assumption on my part
Then we’d know this set of language features you’re familiar enough with to hold that cert. It might cut down on the waste and proliferation of useless tech that seems to be strangling the industry because people just want it on their resume.
It would do enough to dissuade companies from hiring non-licensed engineers (hey you could actually call yourself and engineer and not feel like an imposter), and would put a hard liability on things that definitely need it: financial and health data, which seems to be ripe for exploit and disclosure.
One way or another the insanity of the current system needs to stop.
I could ask about how the class loader worked or the syntax associated with a particular construct (that that language level - not anything later) and get the correct answer.
They could pass tests and follow instructions.
Licensure for problem solving is difficult. Extend that to different domains and it is an even harder problem to solve.
https://www.nspe.org/resources/pe-magazine/may-2018/ncees-en...
> The Software Engineering PE exam, which has struggled to reach an audience, will be discontinued by the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying after the April 2019 administration. The exam has been administered five times, with a total of 81 candidates.
> NCEES’s Committee on Examination Policy and Procedures reviews the history of any exam with fewer than 50 total first-time examinees in two consecutive administrations and makes recommendations to the NCEES Board of Directors about the feasibility of continuing the exam.
> In 2013, the software exam became the latest addition to the family of PE exams. The exam was developed by NSPE, IEEE-USA, the IEEE Computer Society, and the Texas Board of Professional Engineers—a group known as the Software Engineering Consortium. Partnering with NCEES, the consortium began working in 2007 to spread the word about the importance of software engineering licensure for the public health, safety, and welfare.
> This collaboration was preceded by Texas becoming the first state to license software engineers in 1998. The Texas Board of Professional Engineers ended the experience-only path to software engineering licensure in 2006; before the 2013 introduction of the software engineering PE exam, licensure candidates had to take an exam in another discipline.
I think a lot of average programmers will end up accredited if they see it as a path to a job, just like we see with Microsoft certificate programs. And if that happens, I wouldn’t want the accreditation test to be my company’s hiring bar. I’ll still run my own interview to make sure candidates are actually good. And so will most companies. So the time consuming interviews won’t actually go away.
The one big problem licensing would solve is that we could insist some baseline amount of security knowledge is in the tests. Right now, plenty of people get jobs handling sensitive personal data without knowing the first thing about how to keep data secure. That just can’t continue. It’s insane.
It varies on your state but to become a Master X it often requires >5 years. (ex 5 for CO Master Plumber [2], 4 for TX Master Plumber [3], 7 or 5 + Bachelors in NY [4]). Imagine needing to pair program with somebody for 5 years before you could be considered Senior. That'd probably cause a lot more professional development than the current copy from stack overflow meta but also really irritate a lot of young professionals. You can't even quit and start your own business because you can't write software as a journeyman without senior supervision!
[1]: https://www.aopa.org/training-and-safety/active-pilots/safet...
[2]: https://dpo.colorado.gov/Plumbing/Applications
[3]: https://tsbpe.texas.gov/license-types/master-plumber/
[4]: https://www.nyc.gov/site/buildings/industry/obtain-a-master-...
I think another issue is that there's no feasible inspection process or liability management. We have crap like SOC2 and PCI compliance but they're so dependent on self reporting that they mean little practice. Mountains of spaghetti code accumulated over decades are not inspectable like a building is. Software salary costs are already very high and this would push it even further up. It would eliminate offshoring/outsourcing as an option from businesses and they would lobby hard against it. Uncertified software products from other countries would need import controls, and all other sorts of issues that don't exist in our unregulated environment right now
It's also hard to imagine what sort of massive software failure would be required to spur regulatory change that we haven't already experienced and collectively shrugged and did nothing about.
Not exactly, but that's why we have different certificates, endorsements, and type ratings that show demonstrated competence with each type of airplane.
Oh, wait, it does.
>“Hello, I am a certified pilot.”
>“Great! You start tomorrow!”
Even the most minimal pilots license, a.k.a. the PPL, still requires approximately 40 hours give or take of instruction, taking the ground school exam, and finally passing a check ride with a certified flight instructor.
Flying a passenger airliner as you seem to be alluding to basically means that you have a commercial license and likely an ATP - we're talking hundreds if not thousands of hours of flight experience.
Unbelievable.