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I've recently been doing a fair amount of reading about how craftsmanship worked in late medieval and renaissance Europe -- think crafts guilds of Florence, whi
by gyulai 5y ago
I've recently been doing a fair amount of reading about how craftsmanship worked in late medieval and renaissance Europe -- think crafts guilds of Florence, which were the societal context where the Medici happened and Leonardo da Vinci and many of those good things.
One of the things that jumped out at me was that gatekeeping was institutionalized at the guild-level, rather than the level of the individual company.
You only had to prove to the guild of wool once that you knew how to work with wool at the master craftsman level, and then the individual merchants and companies within the same guild would accept that more or less at face value.
If there were repeated complaints about your craftsmanship, those, too, surfaced at the guild level rather than just the individual company level, and might put an end to your guild membership.
It would be really cool if the ACM, BCS, IEEE, or any one of those professional associations, started doing something like that, i.e. you could just be an "IEEE-certified dude who friggin just knows what they're doing". Then companies could just say "people without IEEE-certification at the master craftsman level need not apply", instead of giving people exams of technical competence that are insulting to the people who will actually pass them.
On the other end of the lifecycle, an employer who finds an employee repeatedly falling short on craftsmanship could report that person to the IEEE, and they would investigate the complaint and revoke certification if appropriate.
Also: This is how it works for doctors & lawyers, and some other kinds of professionals. I don't understand why it wouldn't be equally useful in Software Engineering to have such a system.
- lbriner 5y agoInteresting idea but I think the arena of comp-sci is far more diverse than a traditional craftsman. I finished an engineering apprenticeship once and it said that I had reached a basic standard in engineering but that didn't mean I could work on anything after that. My skillset was very much railway traction and any deviation would have required significant training. Same with development. If you have done the same old crap for 20 years, that doesn't automatically put you on par with a genuine skilled senior dev (you might not even be good enough to be a junior). I do agree though that I think there should be trade qualifications for developers and although I would feel aggrevied about sitting exams for things I have done for 20 years, I couldn't argue that it would remove a lot of these screening exams and could be just "Required: Grade 5 .Net developer or something"
- dboreham 5y agoThis is why most hiring is done through personal networks, where trusted people vouch for the abilities and experience of a candidate. The coding test stuff is a workaround for when that route isn't an option.
- gyulai 5y agoI believe, for some people, personal networking truly isn't an option. For example, I work remotely for U.S.-based companies while living in a rural area of Germany. There simply aren't any professionals around here who do things that are similar to what I do, and whenever I meet any people at all IRL who are vaguely software engineers, their companies' pay bands top out at maybe half my salary expectation. So I don't just "organically" meet people IRL who could usefully connect me to my next job. My role at my company isn't outside-facing. I'm never in any meetings that involve vendors or customers or anything like that. And my company has been very clear, that if I want to do things like attend conferences etc., I'd have to do it on my own dime, and in my free time. Needless to say, the projects I work on are never open source. So where does that leave me network-wise?
- mywittyname 5y ago> It would be really cool if the ACM, BCS, IEEE, or any one of those professional associations, Not software engineering, but AWS/GCP/Azure* certifications are basically this. They are rigorous enough that you can't just luck into passing the tests, you actually have to study (for the higher level ones at least). And some are tiered, so you have to get a requisite cert, wait, then take the test for the next level. ABET has a professional engineering exam for software engineering, but nobody ever takes it. This is the same organization responsible for licensing other engineering disciplines. I find it interesting that so many software engineers denigrate the field for not being "real" engineering, but none of those people are taking the FE/PE exams to create that critical mass necessary to begin making it a requirement for employment. Part of this might be ignorance, maybe people don't know that software engineering has a licensing body already. Or maybe most of us don't want to be forced to get a license for a job. * I don't have Azure certs, so I'm assuming here.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y agoAWS exams are absolutely cheatable, there are numerous exam dumps on udemy. You can have a high schooler collect all 9 certs without a single hour of commercial experience.