It hasn't failed to advance as a discipline. I'm nowhere near retirement and even so I've seen massive advances in my lifetime: 1. The widespread adoption of u

It hasn't failed to advance as a discipline. I'm nowhere near retirement and even so I've seen massive advances in my lifetime: 1. The widespread adoption of unit testing and associated techniques like continuous integration. A massive boost to software engineering reliability and productivity. 2. Introduction of crash reporters and associated analytics, this enabled huge improvements in software stability. On the server side, good logging and monitoring systems provide an equivalent. 3. Sandboxing going from unheard of to relatively widely used. 4. Design, development and then open sourcing of extremely robust and well engineered runtimes like the JVM, .NET etc. This has huge benefits throughout the entire industry. 5. Open source and the huge code reuse it made possible. etc etc. All these things have been drastically more impactful than bureaucratic central planning a la certifications.