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I can imagine it now. An alternate reality where all programmers are "certified software engineers" except for a handful of hobbyists. I log onto hacker news, c

• GFischer 10y ago
  It can go the other way too. Here in Uruguay the local ("free") state university was for a long time the only place to get an engineering degree. They somehow decided that they needed to set insanely hard exams, so that 97% of the students fail (not an exaggeration). So they had a nice monopoly and could command huge salaries. Most of those students that fail now transfer to private universities and end up being perfectly acceptable engineers, programmers, etc. But the very few that end up graduating (about 1 in a 1000) are really very good at problem solving and I doubt that any one of them that chooses CS would fail fizz buzz. They're required to write their own compilers, write a hardware driver, and other stuff, up to what would be postgraduate level in the U.S. The market doesn't really recognize the insane stuff they had to go through and often pays them the same as a graduate from a private university (which is "easier" by virtue of being sane, I'd say most are perfectly acceptable in the exigence level) http://www.elpais.com.uy/informacion/ingenieria-solo-3-6-de-nuevos-estudiantes-salva-matematicas.html http://www.elpais.com.uy/informacion/ingenieria-solo-3-6-de-... http://noticias.universia.edu.uy/en-portada/noticia/2013/05/06/1021263/96-4-nuevos-estudiantes-ingenieria-no-aprueba-matematicas.html http://noticias.universia.edu.uy/en-portada/noticia/2013/05/...