| > This is false. Bridges are large and have failure cases that managers and government officials understand. They only think they understand. > Software is invisible and has failure cases that are completely incomprehensible. Which are becoming increasingly comprehensible with better tooling and data collection. > Hiring a bridge designer from another country who is really keen on avoiding the background check will raise some eyebrows. It does in software too; at least with serious companies. > Hiring a nearly anonymous software engineer from who knows where is business as usual for many large companies. These typically come through staffing companies because most large companies are awful at hiring technical talent. They have a long-term relationship with the staffing company and expect the staffing company to ensure the competency of the workers. I actually think licensing software developers would put an end to this; as it would give HR departments a relatively high-fidelity signal to sort the professionals from the hobbyists (by far the hardest thing for a non-technical person to do in hiring developers IMO). > Maybe shift gears and become a process consultant. Losing a license in software is not a deterrent. "Processes" are rapidly converging into off-the-shelf SaaS products, and the industry is actually starting to slow down quite a bit. Trust me, the Big 4 and similar management consulting firms are in for a world of hurt over the next 5 years as AWS, GCP and Azure start to hone in on the ERP systems and reference process space. Companies today would rather spend $1M and 2 months to implement a non-customized, off-the-shelf solution that can be maintained by cheap offshore resources than spend $30M and 2 years to build something custom that requires a dedicated support and maintenance team. Maybe there's some vendor selection and strategy up front, but all those companies that used to do process consulting just become system integrators (for guess what -- software!) |