| All fields have big yearly meetings as you describe. And people interviewing at them. Including, as I mentioned, ones organized by the ACM and IEEE. Here's the ACM's stepping-off point for graduating students: https://www.acm.org/education/resources-for-grads . They have a twice monthly publication called CareerNews. The ACM links to the many resources available for getting an idea of pay scales in different parts of the country. At this point, I don't know what to say. Yes, a few fields have credentialed requirements, ranging from haircutter to certified public accountant to lawyer to surgeon to engineer. Most do not. For example, if you plan working in predictive modeling at drug discovery company, no such credentials exist. Moreover, a credential from an actuarial society will almost worthless, and surely less important than a MS in biostatistics. You keep coming back to: "why are economists and actuaries and statisticians able to judge a persons competence in some sort of standardized way". Shrug I know nothing about those fields. For all I know, it's because there is a well-known set of laws and regulations they have to follow, and generally accepted practices, so most of the need for competence is to ensure that people know those laws and practices. That's not the case for most fields. Including computer science, in all of its forms and incarnations. |