[coredog64]

Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity. Sure, medicine and law are widely taught. Those same two groups work to ensure that it's very difficult to acquire and apply that knowledge. Getting into med school is difficult and expensive, with a license to practice even more so.

[jsmthrowaway]

I'm not indicating whether I agree or disagree, but: the stakes are high with both. Bad lawyer can doom a client for the rest of his life. Bad doctor can take life. I expect compsci to become more difficult as our stakes continue to increase, and we are already getting there with Ashley Madison/USG level PII disclosures and mass surveillance engineering, for example. Some life or death fields within our own are already there or on their way.

Think about all the bad programmers you are aware of, and think about how many are employed. I believe medicine is trying to avoid that, somewhat understandably, with collateral damage against people who would otherwise be good doctors but are unlucky. Calling it a conspiracy might be a bit of a reach. Take that sentiment into watching Patch Adams, for example, and the big bad mean medical establishment might make a smidgen more sense. On grounds of dignity and tradition is one thing, but competency is another and I think the root of the conflict.

This is all interesting of course when you also, correctly, notice that there are many bad doctors and lawyers all the same. My ex-wife's divorce attorney needed help from my own understanding notary procedure (yes, really). But hard to say whether there are fewer with the system in place. Maybe there are.

Again, no opinion being shared on whether I agree with the practice or not (I'm honestly unsure, if you want the truth), just an observation. Maybe some of the issues in our industry, particularly incredibly lax security practices, might be mitigated with a bar to entry similar to medicine. I simply don't have that answer and I can see arguments on both sides.

[petra]

>> Think about all the bad programmers you are aware of, and think about how many are employed. I believe medicine is trying to avoid that, somewhat understandably, with collateral damage against people who would otherwise be good doctors but are unlucky.

It's not accurate.

We definitely know from the UK, Australia and Africa, that properly trained nurses can do well, many of the doctor's jobs, while increasing accessibility.

[agentultra]

Liability. If there were actuaries able to accurately assess the risk of your engineering practice you'd have a much different approach to software development in many niches than, "see what sticks and iterate."

My colleague is working towards becoming a licensed engineer in software. I'm learning a lot about formal methods from him in order to build more reliable software, faster.

If we really were software engineers then there would be a state of the art and if you employed any practices short of that you'd be liable for damages your software causes. And you'd probably go out of business pretty fast.