This article unintentionally perfectly rebuts the idea of licensing: https://mcpmag.com/articles/2005/05/11/the-death-of-paper-mc...
Our industry is one where actual skills should and do matter, and much gatekeeping has been reduced.
Professional rote learning is great for mandarin jobs where you are working within a static prescribed framework (legal, accounting, building codes). It is terrible for jobs that require professional taste.
Tell me how you would create a license for a graphic designer or UX specialist.
I actually fail to understand idealists that believe that licensing might even work. Who are y'all?
Certification doesn't prevent accidents - the only thing it provides is scapegoats for faulty systems.
Saying things like this reflects poorly on our community and demonstrates a poor understanding on how much creativity and thought goes into legal and accounting. There's a reason there is a large pay band for lawyers and accountants.
Our society is poor at creating scales and then selecting a cutoff point for illegality. There are 0b10 types of people: binary thinkers and grey area thinkers.
All-or-nothing thinking (often also referred to as ‘black and white thinking’, ‘dichotomous thinking’, ‘absolutist thinking’, or ‘binary thinking’) is a common form of cognitive distortion or ‘unhelpful thinking style’. People who think in all-or-nothing terms may also act in equivalently extreme ways. They may veer, for example, between complete abstinence and ‘binges’, or between extreme effort and none.I would be in favor of licensing knowing it would probably exclude me unless of course it does not require a university degree. I was not born into a family of means and being autodidactic allowed me to excel beyond my upbringing.
The best path would be to have journeyman type of pathway.
You'd still need to interview people because there's no license that will tell you who the good/great candidates are
Basically you find a grad right now and make them do a coding test. Something is broken there.
A degree could include the vocational qualification as a 1 year study, but having the vocation qualification alone would save youngsters a lot of money and reduce the burden on hiring. You could even still interview coding questions but the application process can remove the spam/ai bullshit to some extent. "Can they code?" is answered.
Who would want to work at such a place? Why would I trust the opinions of people who work at such a place?
I acknowledge that some feel their contributions are at that level, but that doesn't mean it's the norm.
Interested to hear if you have a different thought here
My guess for most of us is "not very much at all", several of the best people I've worked with as programmers did not have a CS degree, and I've interviewed people with CS degrees who could not write a function to sum an array of integers in any language of their choosing, meaning "honoring their degree" would have been an unwise choice.
https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineerin...
But this is one of the most entitled industries in the universe. Even the mere notion of suggesting academic degrees, PE Exams and other forms of "gatekeeping" is tantamount to shouting Voldemort's name through a megaphone.