[rosejn]

I am incredibly happy that this will never happen in software development. Elitist, protectionist mechanisms like this would dramatically limit the talent pool, slow down innovation, and restrict thinking to a set of norms agreed upon by a conservative organization intending to maintain the status quo. Programming is more of a meritocracy than in many other fields, and I think we should be proud of this. If people want to earn more then they should practice and learn more. Certifications are codifying yesterdays knowledge. How valuable do you think that is to most organizations, as opposed to keeping up with the latest research or the latest developments in open source? And I don't mean reading the headlines, I mean understanding data structures, algorithms, and architectures. Certificates do things like quiz people on how well they know an API. This is absurd, wasteful, and degrading. These training programs attempt to generate assembly line programmers, but it's like trying to learn history by memorizing dates of past events.

[cabalamat]

> I am incredibly happy that this will never happen in software development.

Oh I don't know, the idea of programmers being better paid has a certain attraction to me :-)

On a more serious note, the way that lawyers and doctors (and some other tradesmen in some jurisdictions) have managed to illegalise competition is wrong and needs to be stopped. Vets can perform operations for a tenth the cost doctors can -- is this because vets are less competent? On the whole, no.

[mister_chips]

I don't think that the competition is illegal. I thought that if you are a private practitioner of either you could just set your prices lower. The fact no-one does maybe implies that either there is a shortage of these people or that they really just do it for the money neither of which are true. I'm pretty sure the entrance criteria do not also include "you must charge X for this service". But I think we see similar pricing weirdness with mobile phone plans - way over priced but here in a free market (at least in the UK) we don't see prices that are really that good for what we get.

I'm pretty sure that salary dose play an important part of people wanting to get into these professions so while you have bright people doing them it is not always what they would be best at. So there is a bottle neck when applying for higher education and I think the problem is when you are 18 you have no idea what will make you happy when you actually graduate. By that point your pretty well financially committed to the profession and thereafter you'll be saying t least the money is good.

Also while I don't like monopolies how you break them is important and hard to do.

[cabalamat]

> I don't think that the competition is illegal.

Yes it is. The whole point is that certain professions have got politicians to pass laws making it illegal for people without the right piece of paper to compete with them.

As Adam Smith said: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public..."

[ippisl]

You just described 2 of the ways that the competition is being limited by law and politics: 1. Controlling the number of doctors graduating per year. 2. Making medical training very long and expensive(even when it's not needed - for example when nurses can replace doctors) so that doctors would inevitably charge higher rates in the future.

Since medicine historically was distributed and built by community doctors , the classic competition limiting strategy of using big monopolies didn't fit here.

So the medical profession uses many different strategies for limiting "distributed" competition.

[GBond]

> Elitist, protectionist mechanisms like this

In fairness to lawyers and doctors, they serve needs that have a larger societal impact thus the need to to have more stringent process of instilling the right training and enforcing ethics.

Programmers are perceived to be be neutral in this regard.

People understand this concept as it applied to lawyers and doctors. Most folks frown on ambulance-chasers and boob-jobs plastic surgeons.

[gaius]

Would it really tho'?

I mean, PE (or CEng in the UK) is an "elitist, protectionist mechanism" but it hasn't hurt innovation in aviation or civil engineering, has it?

[sanderjd]

Very possibly it has - there is no way to know the answer to this kind of what-if, because you either have one or you have the other, you can't let the two alternatives compete with each other over the same time scale and then measure the outcomes. Very similar to the question of whether software patents help or hurt software innovation. There has been innovation in engineering with the PE system in place, and there has been innovation in software with the patent system in place, but there is no way to know if there would have been more or less over the same time period without those controls.