It's really a difficult issue. There has been a lot of discussion about it in the Communications of the ACM over the past decade (maybe longer, I've only been

It's really a difficult issue. There has been a lot of discussion about it in the Communications of the ACM over the past decade (maybe longer, I've only been a member so long). Companies don't want there to be any standards because it would mean they would have to pay a lot more for skilled developers, they would have to have software engineers able to override MBAs when making business decisions about scheduling, they would be answerable when they cut corners while treating software as a cost center (despite their business being literally impossible to conduct without it in most cases), etc. Developers, meanwhile, generally don't like the idea because it raises the barrier to entry, and it would establish standards that are extremely likely to be disagreed with by large numbers of people. Other professions have dealt with this, however, so it's not a completely unsolvable problem. I'd personally think that 'registered, licensed software engineers' might be something that a company would only need if producing certain kinds of products. If you're building an in-house processing system whose behavior and outputs your business is entirely legally responsible for, you probably don't need the licensed engineers. If you're building self-driving cars, though, yeah, you'd have to follow some standard practices and such. One would hope they would be fairly high-level, such as simply requiring static analysis be performed rather than getting as specific as mandating a specific tool be used. It's understandable that there is hesitation, but I worry that the hesitation will bite us badly. A government stepping in and mandating programming languages and libraries and creating a regulatory body and all of that wouldn't be completely unheard of for things dealing with infrastructure. And nobody wants that.