3 ms·

However, should a practicing lawyer have to re-pass the bar in order to land a new job?

by shadowcodex 10y ago

snerbles 10y ago
Are we going to make the PE exam a requirement for the title of "Software Engineer"?
- eternalban 10y ago
  If "software engineers" want to be treated like "professional engineers". Licensing has been proven to work for other engineering fields.
- prions 10y ago
  It really should be considered. I'm a registered (civil) EIT. IT would help towards the ambiguity in hiring and the ever increasing absurdity in interviewing. Especially since the conflicting statements of "software jobs need protection to ensure good salaries" and "everybody needs to code" are all to prevalent here. Being a PE means you have a certain level of experience and skill. It's a distinguishing feature and sets you apart as a "real" engineer. Additionally, it holds you to an ethical code. What continues to astound me is the lack of rigor and ethical backbone coming from engineers in important places. Yeah you're not building a bridge, but incidents like Volkswagen and Yahoo could have been prevented if people's jobs were bound by not being unethical.
  - yourapostasy 10y ago
    I suspect your advocacy of a PE designation for software and the discussion in this thread are slightly orthogonal. Not that is a bad characteristic, but I want to point out that the question under discussion would be similar to asking if civil engineers should prepare as if they are sitting for their PE exam every single time they start the interviewing process? Should practicing doctors, no matter how accomplished, prepare as if sitting for their boards every single time they start the interviewing process to say, move to a new hospital? I also suspect that everyone is asking the wrong questions. From the anti algorithm questions for interviews crowd, there is scant acknowledgement that it can't be a blanket policy, as undoubtedly some positions are strongly algorithm-heavy roles. From the pro- crowd, there is scant acknowledgement that by the time you are trying to find new high tech hires through a process that bases an evaluation upon actual interactions that are measured in hours or at best days, you may have already failed. The industry is fitting an interviewing process last majorly overhauled during the industrial age that screens for basic three-R's and attendance skills onto a post-industrial landscape where those skills are barely above cosmic background radiation noise, and demonstrated achievers are as often groomed into hirings through networking over years and decades. Perhaps part of the response to better outcomes to "this high tech interviewing process that takes place in hours or days" isn't "find better questions" or "find a better procedure that still fits in hours or days", but "re-think our premises"? Some kind of PE might fit into that re-think, but the brokenness is so bad that Google has quantified the inability of our conventional processes to yield significantly-better-than-random outcomes, so it might be time to start questioning the entire premise that we can even hire based upon tech interviews in the first place.
    - n00b101 10y ago
      > Should practicing doctors, no matter how accomplished, prepare as if sitting for their boards every single time they start the interviewing process to say, move to a new hospital? But software engineers doesn't have any such designation or examination process, so I don't understand this analogy. If anyone could call themselves a doctor, then the interview process would have to be far more rigorous. Also, I think doctors do need to rewrite certain exams every few years to retain their medical license.
      - yourapostasy 10y ago
        Most everyone with an undergraduate CS degree will have taken an algorithms course. I think the comparisons with designation and examinations is drawing a rough equivalency to these designations, for example. I can't offhand think of another high-skill profession where the interviewing process tends to draw upon one phase of a career (undergraduate studies), and one specific aspect in that phase (algorithms and not say, compiler design, or programming languages survey, or software engineering, etc.), so our field might be a little odd in that respect if indeed that kind of emphasis is rare across high-skill fields. Doctors, PE's, attorneys have continuing education requirements, but I haven't heard of doctors boning up on say, anatomy or OChem for their interviews, for example. For those who hold a PE, what have interviews in your field been like?
    - dpark 10y ago
      > but I want to point out that the question under discussion would be similar to asking if civil engineers should prepare as if they are sitting for their PE exam every single time they start the interviewing process? I suspect the typical PE exam is quite a bit more rigorous than the typical technical interview. Technical software engineer interviewees are asked to do thinks like reverse linked lists and provide the most basic runtime and space complexity analysis. The structural engineering PE covers everything from load analysis and building codes to runoff analysis an slope stability[1]. There are 9 different "breadth" exam areas and 3 different "depth" areas, and they're all covered. I think it's slightly ridiculous to compare understanding basic datastructures and algorithms to sitting for a PE. [1] http://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/Civ-Str-April-2015_with-design-standards.rev3_.pdf http://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/Civ-Str-April-2015_with-...
- n00b101 10y ago
  Many professions have designations that require passing standardized exams, minimum qualified experience requirements, and on-going professional development requirements. Doctors and lawyers are the most prominent such examples, but it is also true of actuaries and licensed professional engineers. Tradespeople, like plumbers and electricians, also have licensing requirements. In finance, there is the CFA designation, along with a number of securities exams and registrations imposed by financial regulators for certain roles. Managers, of course, have the MBA professional degree, which somehow counts as a "professional degree." These systems are beneficial to both employers and employees. As an employee, you gain a certain amount of job security, mobility and collective bargaining power by having a recognized professional designation and an association of peers that can prescribe ethics and safety rules to defend against abuses by management. And as an employer, you can safely hire professionals without an onerous amount of vetting - you know that, for example, your electrician won't burn down your building with faulty wiring because he can't solve an electrician's equivalent "Fizz Buzz." For whatever reason, the software engineering profession has no such professional organization. Perhaps it is because software engineering is a relatively new field. Many of the examples of functioning professional associations are related to very old professions (e.g. doctors, lawyers, and even actuaries), and some have their roots in the medieval system of guilds and apprenticeships. The MBA and CFA professional designations were established in the 1940s. Somehow it is difficult to imagine that, at this point, a software engineering professional designation could ever be established.

However, should a practicing lawyer have to re-pass the bar in order to land a new job?

snerbles 10y ago

Are we going to make the PE exam a requirement for the title of "Software Engineer"?

eternalban 10y ago
If "software engineers" want to be treated like "professional engineers". Licensing has been proven to work for other engineering fields.
prions 10y ago
It really should be considered. I'm a registered (civil) EIT. IT would help towards the ambiguity in hiring and the ever increasing absurdity in interviewing. Especially since the conflicting statements of "software jobs need protection to ensure good salaries" and "everybody needs to code" are all to prevalent here. Being a PE means you have a certain level of experience and skill. It's a distinguishing feature and sets you apart as a "real" engineer. Additionally, it holds you to an ethical code. What continues to astound me is the lack of rigor and ethical backbone coming from engineers in important places. Yeah you're not building a bridge, but incidents like Volkswagen and Yahoo could have been prevented if people's jobs were bound by not being unethical.
- yourapostasy 10y ago
  I suspect your advocacy of a PE designation for software and the discussion in this thread are slightly orthogonal. Not that is a bad characteristic, but I want to point out that the question under discussion would be similar to asking if civil engineers should prepare as if they are sitting for their PE exam every single time they start the interviewing process? Should practicing doctors, no matter how accomplished, prepare as if sitting for their boards every single time they start the interviewing process to say, move to a new hospital? I also suspect that everyone is asking the wrong questions. From the anti algorithm questions for interviews crowd, there is scant acknowledgement that it can't be a blanket policy, as undoubtedly some positions are strongly algorithm-heavy roles. From the pro- crowd, there is scant acknowledgement that by the time you are trying to find new high tech hires through a process that bases an evaluation upon actual interactions that are measured in hours or at best days, you may have already failed. The industry is fitting an interviewing process last majorly overhauled during the industrial age that screens for basic three-R's and attendance skills onto a post-industrial landscape where those skills are barely above cosmic background radiation noise, and demonstrated achievers are as often groomed into hirings through networking over years and decades. Perhaps part of the response to better outcomes to "this high tech interviewing process that takes place in hours or days" isn't "find better questions" or "find a better procedure that still fits in hours or days", but "re-think our premises"? Some kind of PE might fit into that re-think, but the brokenness is so bad that Google has quantified the inability of our conventional processes to yield significantly-better-than-random outcomes, so it might be time to start questioning the entire premise that we can even hire based upon tech interviews in the first place.
  - n00b101 10y ago
    > Should practicing doctors, no matter how accomplished, prepare as if sitting for their boards every single time they start the interviewing process to say, move to a new hospital? But software engineers doesn't have any such designation or examination process, so I don't understand this analogy. If anyone could call themselves a doctor, then the interview process would have to be far more rigorous. Also, I think doctors do need to rewrite certain exams every few years to retain their medical license.
    - yourapostasy 10y ago
      Most everyone with an undergraduate CS degree will have taken an algorithms course. I think the comparisons with designation and examinations is drawing a rough equivalency to these designations, for example. I can't offhand think of another high-skill profession where the interviewing process tends to draw upon one phase of a career (undergraduate studies), and one specific aspect in that phase (algorithms and not say, compiler design, or programming languages survey, or software engineering, etc.), so our field might be a little odd in that respect if indeed that kind of emphasis is rare across high-skill fields. Doctors, PE's, attorneys have continuing education requirements, but I haven't heard of doctors boning up on say, anatomy or OChem for their interviews, for example. For those who hold a PE, what have interviews in your field been like?
  - dpark 10y ago
    > but I want to point out that the question under discussion would be similar to asking if civil engineers should prepare as if they are sitting for their PE exam every single time they start the interviewing process? I suspect the typical PE exam is quite a bit more rigorous than the typical technical interview. Technical software engineer interviewees are asked to do thinks like reverse linked lists and provide the most basic runtime and space complexity analysis. The structural engineering PE covers everything from load analysis and building codes to runoff analysis an slope stability[1]. There are 9 different "breadth" exam areas and 3 different "depth" areas, and they're all covered. I think it's slightly ridiculous to compare understanding basic datastructures and algorithms to sitting for a PE. [1] http://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/Civ-Str-April-2015_with-design-standards.rev3_.pdf http://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/Civ-Str-April-2015_with-...
n00b101 10y ago
Many professions have designations that require passing standardized exams, minimum qualified experience requirements, and on-going professional development requirements. Doctors and lawyers are the most prominent such examples, but it is also true of actuaries and licensed professional engineers. Tradespeople, like plumbers and electricians, also have licensing requirements. In finance, there is the CFA designation, along with a number of securities exams and registrations imposed by financial regulators for certain roles. Managers, of course, have the MBA professional degree, which somehow counts as a "professional degree." These systems are beneficial to both employers and employees. As an employee, you gain a certain amount of job security, mobility and collective bargaining power by having a recognized professional designation and an association of peers that can prescribe ethics and safety rules to defend against abuses by management. And as an employer, you can safely hire professionals without an onerous amount of vetting - you know that, for example, your electrician won't burn down your building with faulty wiring because he can't solve an electrician's equivalent "Fizz Buzz." For whatever reason, the software engineering profession has no such professional organization. Perhaps it is because software engineering is a relatively new field. Many of the examples of functioning professional associations are related to very old professions (e.g. doctors, lawyers, and even actuaries), and some have their roots in the medieval system of guilds and apprenticeships. The MBA and CFA professional designations were established in the 1940s. Somehow it is difficult to imagine that, at this point, a software engineering professional designation could ever be established.