4 ms·
A professional certificate is not a quality grading tool, it's a pricing mechanism. Thus the demand for the certification needs to come from the selfish needs
by fsloth 10y ago
A professional certificate is not a quality grading tool, it's a pricing mechanism.
Thus the demand for the certification needs to come from the selfish needs of the certified profession.
First requirement is that there is an oversupply of qualified candidates. As the demands for software engineers shows no signs of abating I would claim attaining this first requirement would be quite hard. On the other hand, if supply of eligible candidates exceeded demand we would have a certification program done almost by itself - unless the big tech incumbents fought terribly against it, of course.
- spacemanmatt 10y agoWere you working in 2008? Demand can ebb.
- fsloth 10y agoYes, but it's not as if we can fabricate these events.
- ThrowawayR2 10y ago>A professional certificate is not a quality grading tool, it's a pricing mechanism. Is it? At one time, physicians, too, were not all that keen on the idea of licensing. "David A. Johnson and Humayun J. Chaudhry's surprisingly engaging Medical Licensing and Discipline in America: A History of the Federation of State Medical Boards was published to commemorate the centennial celebration of the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB). It opens with the infamous John Brinkley, known for transplanting live goat testicles into men in order to 'cure' impotence, and segues neatly into demonstrating how vital licensure and discipline continue to be for the medical profession and the general public. The authors pepper the book with many other such examples, making the dry remote process of licensure absorbing and pertinent to the reader..." Having seen (allegedly) senior software developers do architectural things equivalent to said ghastly transplant, I'm not so sure licensure for software engineers would be a bad thing anymore.
- fsloth 10y agoThe goat testicle treatment reference is grand,sir! I'm not so sure medicine is the best example in managing a rational body work. It's still riddled with eminence rather than evidence based treatments. The disparity between the stuff that works - which is friggin amazing - and between what is at best invasive placebo is quite large. But yeah, I agree, licensing if done properly can cut the tail of total nutjobs and incompetents. I'm not still sure if that can be the foremost motivator, though.
- tdb7893 10y agoI think licenses makes sense for doctors because they are working on people, their solution is generally specific to one person, and a mistake that they make can have dire consequences. Software engineering can also have large consequences but in those cases it's probably significantly more effective to test the actual product than test the engineers.
- fsloth 10y agoThanks, I think this is the most clear cut analysis of values at play.
- rafiki6 10y agoNot sure how your value analysis differs. Clearly "test the product" isn't good enough with empirical evidence. Otherwise we wouldn't have large security and data breaches that result in money and productivity loss.
- tdb7893 10y agoI'm talking about regulation and those failures don't seem to be regulatory failures. I guess you could try to regulate to stop having data beaches but I think it would be too broad and largely ineffective anyway but in the case you regulated essentially every web app then a license might be more efficient than actually testing everything. I was thinking more along the lines of things that could cause physical harm (e.g. medical devices) where it makes a bunch more sense to test the device than test the engineers