[Kamq]

> I have my doubts about being a serious engineering profession.

It's not. If it were, vaguely talented amateurs wouldn't run circles around people with degrees.

But to get it to that level, we'd have to figure out 1. how to teach it, and 2. how to measure it.

1 is probably more important, but you can't really have a licensed profession when the students being educated don't actually know how to do the job that you're licensing. You would have to set the standards so low that it would be a useless license.

[flakeoil]

I don't think the standards have to be low, but the software engineering field would have to be narrowed down. Only teach and use a certain few languages, only use certain tools, only use certain patterns, only use a specific few frameworks etc. That's basically what construction engineering is. There are many ways to build a house, but only a few that are approved and accepted.

It could maybe work, although new inventions would be slow to catch on. A bit like in construction engineering today.

Maybe for some security related tasks it should be a requirement in some cases. A bit like software for airplanes and trains etc.

[Kamq]

> I don't think the standards have to be low

Based on what you've described, I disagree. Most colleges have already winnowed things down to teaching in only one or two languages. Usually java and python. And from what I've observed, most students still don't learn much.

We, as a field, don't know how to teach people to code. The closest we've gotten is showing people what an if statement and a loop are, show them a couple examples, and then tell them to screw around for a while until it clicks. And for some of them it does.

If you want standards to be higher than a random teenager who screws around for a summer, this has to change. Or you have to accept that ~75% of college graduates are not going to be able to go into their profession.