[aithrowawaycomm]

Doctors and lawyers are licensed, software engineers are not. If a doctor or lawyer screws up they will often face sanctions and lawsuits, whereas a software engineer can just jump ship to a different company and let their resume do the talking. In general it is way easier to get 3 years of experience as a software engineer than it is to go to law school and pass the bar.

I am sympathetic to the argument that software engineers should be licensed, which would reduce the need for dumb technical interviews. But I imagine HN wouldn't like that very much.

[ryandrake]

> I am sympathetic to the argument that software engineers should be licensed, which would reduce the need for dumb technical interviews. But I imagine HN wouldn't like that very much.

Oh yea, HN hates this idea, but I'm sure it would cut down on all the screening, FizzBuzz, hazing that happens during interviews. If you had a - basic, barebones - certification or exam, that all software engineers must pass, that at least says "This candidate can function at a very minimal level" it would at the very least filter out the 50-75% of candidates who literally cannot code or even speak coherently about the basics of programming.

I think people here are really in love with the romantic ideal that someone with no college, no credentials, no formal-this or certified-that can (in theory) jump right into a senior FAANG job. Yea, that's great I guess, but in practice does it really work? It seems to me that in practice, it just means every company gets thousands of totally unqualified candidates every time they post a job offer, and this helps nobody.

[Viliam1234]

Isn't there a business opportunity somewhere, providing exams and certificates for software developers? I find it surprising that many rich companies have this problem, and there is no standard solution yet.

How much would it cost e.g. Google to start an independent certification company, with branches in 20 different cities across USA. The top candidates could be also offered a job at Google, but every candidate would get a certificate confirming their skill level that many other companies would probably be happy to accept.

At first, the testing could be done for a symbolic cost, because Google already spends some money to interview its candidates anyway, and this would also serve the purpose. But later, when many companies start accepting the certificate, you could let the candidates pay the full cost.

The first rounds of testing could be done at a computer (provided by the testing company), you would just make sure the candidates are not cheating. Only those who achieve a sufficiently high score would be later interviewed by humans. This would be way more efficient than interviewing everyone individually.

[aithrowawaycomm]

What's curious is that in the US there are many IT trade certifications (e.g. A+) and many engineering certifications (Professional Engineer) but software engineering falls into a weird gap. I think IEEE offers some certificates but they don't seem especially valuable.

[tmtvl]

Oracle has Java certs. That's something MS could also do with CSharp, AdaCore with Ada,...

How useful that stuff is/would be in practise, I don't know.

[hnfong]

They kind of offer this service for free already. Who's going to pay them to do it? :)