[gmadsen]

one difference though is that varying levels of skill can be staggeringly different for SWE compared to a plumber. There are people that have been coding in basic since 12 and hacking their entire childhoods, and you have some people that coded for the first time in a cs program which they completed in an average fashion.

[jethro_tell]

True, I started sorting parts in a plumbing shop when I was 12, you still have to get certified and to get certified you take the same classes as everyone else. That's the same for doctors, and lawyers and all that shit.

This is why we don't have a base of expected knowledge in the field and why we do strange coding tests to try to guess if someone is competent.

[ghaff]

Not everyone is equally good of course but I would be very cautious about making hacking since 12 a requirement for a developer job. It certainly doesn't have its equivalent in any other branch of engineering or indeed just about anywhere else other than the arts.

[jethro_tell]

And yet finding someone competent for the job is like a needle in a hay stack.

Having a base of expected/certified knowledge would take a lot of that away.

[ghaff]

And yet every other technical field which has no expectation that this has been a passion since childhood and applicants should have personal projects in the field manages somehow to hire people.

[jethro_tell]

That's what I'm saying. We could train a base of knowledge so that skills transfer and we don't have to find super specialized operators for every role. When you get a union plumber to the shop, you know that they passed their certification. You may not like working with them or they may do sloppy work or something but as a whole, you're going to get a competent operator once the apprenticeship is finished.

[Jensson]

That will work once the world has decided upon a single web stack with standardized API design and security and every company uses that web stack. When that happened hiring web stack developers will be a standardized process similar to plumbers today as you say. But be are very far from that level of standardization.

[gmadsen]

I'm not sure about other industries, but for me personally, my competency is in large part based on my ability to quickly pick up domain knowledge and apply it successfully.

I'm not really sure how you test for a base level of that, besides proven demonstration on your resume and doing semi-correlated coding quizzes.