[TAForObvReasons]

> Software Engineering is a notable exception, most other fields don't quiz as part of the job interview process: soft skills and credentials or state licenses or bar exams are relied upon more heavily. Maybe signaling matters more in these fields?

License and bar exams are more serious than people in technology are willing and ready to admit. They serve the role of quizzes because the "passing score" requires a baseline of knowledge that the quizzes attempt to establish. This isn't a matter of signaling so much as the effectiveness of the testing process. The fact that software companies cannot rely on these factors is a poor reflection of the industry.

Practically speaking, there's nothing stopping the JS foundation from developing a curriculum, standard test and credential.

[ilaksh]

The first issue is that JS has evolved every few years. For example, we went from callbacks to promises and now to async/await. Or look at how modules have evolved. Or the use of const and let vs. var.

The other issue is that there are layers of other skills that also evolve every few years.

So to create a "bar exam" for a front-end web engineer, for example, you would need a completely different version every two years or so.

But then probably a bigger problem is that software engineering requires certain types of problem solving and to get a realistic idea of problem solving abilities of a person at large enough scale problems you would need a huge investment into the testing infrastructure and varied content. You would need sophisticated programs to test the applicants programs. And people to review code. And those tests would quickly go out of date.

Then the other thing is that there is so much variation in the types of languages or frameworks or tools used, it is questionable whether it is meaningful to test on some lowest-common-denominator set of tools at all, if you could find enough agreement on such a thing (e.g. Angular vs React, React vs Vue).

[JMTQp8lwXL]

Async/await is just syntactic sugar for Promises.

A CS bar exam should just assess fundamentals -- if you have a good CS base, and problem-solving skills, you will adapt with the times as technology changes. Then, it wouldn't need to be updated to include new ES6 functionality. Besides, someone who does back-end Java doesn't need to concern themselves with language change to JavaScript. That's another reason why such an exam should be generic.

I'm honestly surprised nobody has tried to make that a thing. It'd save companies so much in time and effort if they could just say "yup, this person has the credential".

[mcguire]

Many people have.

Most of them were vendor specific and so sucked.

Others were too low-level and so were meaningless, or never had any buy-in from anyone. They sucked.

Finally, can you image the same crowd that complains about technical interviews responding to a bar exam? "I haven't ever had to write a binary tree in my 30-years of real-world experience! Why would I have to do it for your test?!" That would suck.