I've written services at startups that I know were in place 10+ years later. I'd be surprised if the majority of my code was still powering them, but never the

I've written services at startups that I know were in place 10+ years later. I'd be surprised if the majority of my code was still powering them, but never the less, when you solve a hard problem well - software has quite a bit of staying power. You see similar trends in the PostgreSQL code base where critical code pieces/structures date back to 1991 in some cases. I'd doubt that a professional certification is needed for practitioners of software, but I could see merit in a certification body for software products. There are software products used in critical use cases, where the standard of practice for security, operations, or testing is insufficient for the desired use. As a client of such products, I might choose the "certified" version over the un-certified in a space where I don't believe feature velocity matters. The problem with any of this would be making a compliance regime that didn't boil down to a boring ineffective process.