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Comment by joshdavham | Hacker News Reader

> It's equally dubious to believe that some sort of body (ostensibly run by practicing software developers) would be able to come up with a means to certify proficiency.

I very much mostly agree with you, but I did take the Google Cloud Associate exam a year and a half ago and honestly it felt like a pretty rigorous exam. I definitely could not have passed that exam if I was incompetent in my knowledge of cloud and IT. Exams like these, I think, might become more mainstream in certifying developers in my opinion. (Though whether this is desirable is another question.)

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The question is whether you then want there to be a legal licensing requirement that requires an individual to hold certification to work as a software developer.

Maybe treat it like other professions and have a specific title be protected?

Is it really possible to do that? I think if we were to go down this avenue we would need to consider titles other than software engineer.

yes, it's possible. That's why there's no Software "Engineers" without degrees in Quebec.

Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. The engineering requirements to be a competent software engineer in HFT a Genomics vary wildly. If completing a computer science degree and maybe a Msc in computer science is the answer fair enough, but I don’t think those credentials are enough to label someone a competent Software Engineer.

What could be a generic framework? Do you have any reference to standards?

the requirements to be a dentist are vastly different than that of a brain surgeon.

Yet, both have to have medical degrees in order to be called doctors.

That you specialise after the fact doesn't really mean what you imply, not everyone who becomes a doctor can do brain surgery.

But in this case the title is irrelevant. The purpose of licensing is to define who is allowed to offer their services and actually practice.

If I can build you a web application as a "web developer" but not "software engineer", you haven't accomplished anything by restricting a title. It's basically certification, similar to the Project Management Professional (PMP) title, which you can only use if you've achieved PMB certification. But people without this certification can still work in project management roles.

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