Many professions have designations that require passing standardized exams, minimum qualified experience requirements, and on-going professional development req

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.