[_qulr]

> plumbers, electricians, civil engineers, architects, structural engineers, etc. All these occupations have licensing requirements.

These are almost exclusively local regulations, not US national requirements, and certainly not international.

So even if there were licensing, whose jurisdiction applies? What if you have distributed software development teams?

[itake]

This is a solved problem per our tax laws. Just because you write code that runs on a server in another state, doesn't mean you pay the taxes in that state.

[_qulr]

Different states have dramatically different taxes. Some states have no income taxes.

So in one sense, it's a "solved problem", with the solution being that licensing requirements would be dramatically different based on locality, but in the sense that people want — a uniform standard for hiring software developers — it's not solved at all.

[itake]

> but in the sense that people want — a uniform standard for hiring software developers — it's not solved at all.

Exact same thing can be said about the hiring process in general. Taxes and employment legal contracts vary from state to state. I am sure employers would love a single contract, no matter where they hire an individual, but that is not currently the case.

[TwistedWeasel]

It's complicated so we should just not care?

[_qulr]

I think "Why is software different?" is the wrong question. Why is software the same? Most professions don't need professional licensing, and it's not clear that the economy would be served well by adding licensing requirements.

[TwistedWeasel]

if you look at it economically, maybe. It's a complex problem. The economy doesn't benefit from contractor licensing either, but the consistency reliability and quality of our infrastructure does.

[_qulr]

The reliability of licensed contractors is... questionable. ;-) In some cases it seems pretty silly. For example, beauticians need to be licensed, even though they make very low average salaries, so it's not particularly helpful to them, and it doesn't stop some of them from giving bad haircuts.

The mention of contractors brings up an important point though. Many people support software developer licensing because they believe (mistakenly IMO) that it would make hiring easier, but not all software development is done by employees. In a licensed profession, you cannot legally practice the trade, not even as an entrepreneur, unless you have a license. Are we to apply this same standard to software development? Nobody can write software without a license from the state? Is that even possible? What about the people writing consumer software alone at home? Can nobody even publish a web site with HTML and JavaScript without a license? A web site is essentially all you need to create a billion dollar business, so either licensing prevents that from happening, or licensing won't really be a uniform standard for the software industry.

Mark Zuckerberg was a college dropout. Thus, he wouldn't have a license. No Facebook. Maybe you're ok with that, if you hate Facebook, but nobody really thinks the problem with Facebook is that Zuck was an incompetent programmer. In any case, software development licensing would put up a major barrier to entrepreneurship in the tech industry.