[gwbas1c]

A better way to hire software engineers, or to find a software engineering job.

The problem, when I'm hiring, is that so much of the interviewing process is about determining competence. When I'm job-seeking, a lot of my time is spent determining the competence of the people in charge of the company.

In the medical field, doctors and hospitals are accredited. Thus the interviewing process isn't really about a doctor proving his or her competency, nor does a doctor have to worry about the hospital going bankrupt three years after taking the job.

We really need a professional licensing process for software engineers and the firms that hire us. Even though the tools we use change from year to year, the fundamentals of software development change about as fast as the medical field.

I haven't really come across any hiring firm or headhunter who is really good at determining the competency of a software engineer or the legitimacy of a business trying to hire. It doesn't matter who they are, they always boil down to middle men trying to sell whatever goods they have on hand while making a honest attempt to manage their reputation. They need the licensing process as much as we do because they just don't have the background to determine competence.

[BjoernKW]

There are several differences between the medical field and software engineering, some of which are:

1. The former is highly regulated because of potentially highly catastrophic outcomes in most cases.

2. The former also is several thousand years older than the latter.

[gwbas1c]

The modern medical field is not thousands of years old. It actually emulates the air traffic control system when it comes to its internal regulations and division of labor. This is how they keep out quacks who still believe in bloodletting.

We could do a lot better if we got over our hubris and tried to learn from how other more mature feilds run themselves.

With self-driving cars on the horizon, and with our entire communications infrastructure defined by software, the potential for catastrophe in our industry is greater than the medical industry.

[BjoernKW]

It’s not like nobody’s tried before. The term ’software engineering’ precisely stems from the idea that software development should be more like other engineering disciplines.

That those attempts didn’t work out probably has less to do with developer hubris but with software engineering indeed being different from other engineering disciplines.

After all, we don’t think of medicine in terms of ‘medical engineering’ or ‘human bio-system maintenance’ either, simply because it’s something else.

Besides, certificates are rampant in the IT industry. Most of those however tend to say very little about the actual skills of the ones certified.

[RandomCSGeek]

on a similar note, I'd like to have better job listing aggregators. Something that better understands me.

Currently, when I search for fresher jobs, I always end up getting jobs for 5-6 year experience, or those way away from cities I entered, or those from completely irrelevant fields.

NLP and Deep Learning should be able to do this.