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Fo any other professions have thse challenges? Our lack of basic professional certifications has just led to nonsense in every corner of the hiring and job see

Fo any other professions have thse challenges? Our lack of basic professional certifications has just led to nonsense in every corner of the hiring and job seeking process.

zarzavat 2y ago
There are professional certifications they are just useless. The same goes for university degrees. The field moves too fast for certification to have any value. Perhaps if you do something very “enterprise” it might be useful.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  The uselessness of professional certifications isn't because things move too fast. The fundamentals don't really change. The certifications are useless because they're paper mills, driven by the same incentives as grade inflation. People get upset if they pay for the certification and then fail the test -- and those are the certification mill's customers, so that can't be allowed or people would get some other certification. Or worse, some other vendor's certification. So they make something easy enough for the 10th percentile to pass, or publish a study guide that effectively gives you the answers to the test, and then it isn't serving as a useful filtering mechanism. Meanwhile the strongest applicants rightfully see it as a waste of money because they can get in on their other qualifications or find a job through their networks, or use not having it as a reverse filter to eliminate excessively bureaucratic employers that use it as a prerequisite, causing anyone who requires it to be filtering out more of the best applicants than the worst ones.
  - zarzavat 2y ago
    The fundamentals change all the time. When I learned to code everybody was high on Java, you had to know your design patterns, craft beautiful inheritance hierarchies and all kinds of other things that we now laugh at as being very silly. But people were dead serious about it! This art is still young, we are still finding our feet and I don’t think certifications are beneficial until we do. What we need is more experimentation and free thinking not a general ossification.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      The things that change aren't the fundamentals. Meanwhile people still read the papers that came out of Bell Labs in the mid-20th century, boolean logic is boolean logic, exponential time algorithms are slower than polynomial time algorithms for large N, the lambda calculus is still taught, etc.
Uehreka 2y ago
What are you talking about? We have tons of professional certifications. We also still have all of these problems.
- dang 2y ago
  Can you please make your substantive points without swipes? Your comment would be just fine without that first bit. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
eikenberry 2y ago
The challenge for certifying in software engineering seems similar to the challenges you'd face in any creative, building oriented professions. That is you can't test for it with some sort of standard exam. You need to have the person build something and then have established masters of the field evaluate it. But that requires a professional structure we don't have.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Relatively few engineers of any kind (outside of Civil Engineering)--much less other STEM--have PE licenses in the US. They're mostly required if you're going to be signing off on things for regulators etc. You could do it but now you require a 4+ year degree, exams, and some years of working under a certified engineer.
- vunderba 2y ago
  Many other engineering disciplines have a PE exam, including mechanical engineering and electrical engineering. I'm not sure why you believe that software engineering is somehow more difficult to test in a rigorous manner than those fields. In point of fact, computer science did at one point have an official equivalent PE exam, but it was bafflingly removed a few years ago though I'm not entirely clear on the reason. This is exactly what happens when you don't gate keep enough - employers lose all trust in potential candidates core competencies, and thus we have the increasing arms race of 40 hour multi project 12 course interviews.
  - pseudalopex 2y ago
    > In point of fact, computer science did at one point have an official equivalent PE exam, but it was bafflingly removed a few years ago though I'm not entirely clear on the reason. It was removed because 100 people registered in 6 years.

Fo any other professions have thse challenges? Our lack of basic professional certifications has just led to nonsense in every corner of the hiring and job seeking process.

zarzavat 2y ago

There are professional certifications they are just useless. The same goes for university degrees. The field moves too fast for certification to have any value. Perhaps if you do something very “enterprise” it might be useful.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
The uselessness of professional certifications isn't because things move too fast. The fundamentals don't really change. The certifications are useless because they're paper mills, driven by the same incentives as grade inflation. People get upset if they pay for the certification and then fail the test -- and those are the certification mill's customers, so that can't be allowed or people would get some other certification. Or worse, some other vendor's certification. So they make something easy enough for the 10th percentile to pass, or publish a study guide that effectively gives you the answers to the test, and then it isn't serving as a useful filtering mechanism. Meanwhile the strongest applicants rightfully see it as a waste of money because they can get in on their other qualifications or find a job through their networks, or use not having it as a reverse filter to eliminate excessively bureaucratic employers that use it as a prerequisite, causing anyone who requires it to be filtering out more of the best applicants than the worst ones.
- zarzavat 2y ago
  The fundamentals change all the time. When I learned to code everybody was high on Java, you had to know your design patterns, craft beautiful inheritance hierarchies and all kinds of other things that we now laugh at as being very silly. But people were dead serious about it! This art is still young, we are still finding our feet and I don’t think certifications are beneficial until we do. What we need is more experimentation and free thinking not a general ossification.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    The things that change aren't the fundamentals. Meanwhile people still read the papers that came out of Bell Labs in the mid-20th century, boolean logic is boolean logic, exponential time algorithms are slower than polynomial time algorithms for large N, the lambda calculus is still taught, etc.

Uehreka 2y ago

What are you talking about? We have tons of professional certifications. We also still have all of these problems.

dang 2y ago
Can you please make your substantive points without swipes? Your comment would be just fine without that first bit. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

eikenberry 2y ago

The challenge for certifying in software engineering seems similar to the challenges you'd face in any creative, building oriented professions. That is you can't test for it with some sort of standard exam. You need to have the person build something and then have established masters of the field evaluate it. But that requires a professional structure we don't have.

ghaff 2y ago
Relatively few engineers of any kind (outside of Civil Engineering)--much less other STEM--have PE licenses in the US. They're mostly required if you're going to be signing off on things for regulators etc. You could do it but now you require a 4+ year degree, exams, and some years of working under a certified engineer.
vunderba 2y ago
Many other engineering disciplines have a PE exam, including mechanical engineering and electrical engineering. I'm not sure why you believe that software engineering is somehow more difficult to test in a rigorous manner than those fields. In point of fact, computer science did at one point have an official equivalent PE exam, but it was bafflingly removed a few years ago though I'm not entirely clear on the reason. This is exactly what happens when you don't gate keep enough - employers lose all trust in potential candidates core competencies, and thus we have the increasing arms race of 40 hour multi project 12 course interviews.
- pseudalopex 2y ago
  > In point of fact, computer science did at one point have an official equivalent PE exam, but it was bafflingly removed a few years ago though I'm not entirely clear on the reason. It was removed because 100 people registered in 6 years.