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Programmers would really benefit from a professional organization. Just like medicine, the law, or engineering, the world cannot now live without code. It's i
by camgunz 11y ago
Programmers would really benefit from a professional organization. Just like medicine, the law, or engineering, the world cannot now live without code. It's irresponsible to go on without professional standards, and we see the effects practically every day (hilariously insecure smartphone apps, vulnerabilities that affect 90% of web services, etc.).
We've also ended up with a glut of programmers who end up doing nothing but building database frontends all day. When people talk about a programmer shortage, they mean there's a shortage of programmers who can actually code. There's simply more work than there are workers able to do it.
The result of this is that all programmers are treated as suspects. No other profession requires you to do a dance in every interview you'll ever undergo. Your experience and connections speak for themselves; the interview is to root out personality issues and establish expectations.
The reason, of course, is that law/medicine/etc. have serious consequences for incompetence. You have to be licensed, and you have to prove your competence routinely. Coding should be the same.
- ashurbanipal 11y agoThis is a great idea - is there any reason why there isn't a generally accepted coding equivalent of a CPA or a CMT or any of the other very successful professional certification programs out there? Does the field move too quickly? Is there too much dispersion in talent (or perceived dispersion) by programmers themselves to make it worth turning them into "certified programmers"?
- woodman 11y agoThere are a lot of things in computer science that are very stable points for the certification industry to hook into, foundational things - like where it overlaps with philosophy (logic) and math (set theory, etc). I'm all for higher quality code, but are we going to require web developers to master first order logic before they can throw up isitdownrightnow.com? Specialization is why we aren't dying from rotten teeth or soldering daughter-boards into our PCs anymore, abstraction is what allows us to progress at breakneck speeds. I guess there is a point where the two lines meet, the burden of bureaucracy and rate of quality work - protocol standards come to mind. But I don't think the correct place to lay that burden is at the individual level, put it higher up the stack - company liability for private information disclosure. I guarantee you'd see a steep decline in the number of companies demanding your social security number.