[austin-cheney]

My experience tells me it is an expectation problem coupled against missing standards/baselines.

Most employers need a person in the seat doing the work and will lower their preferences to find enough candidates for a selection. Government does not do that. If candidates fail to meet the requirements for a government contract the seat just remains empty.

Consider how engineering works. An engineers resume will just list employment history, education, and awards. There is no need to fluff things up because engineers are required to have a license(s) and that demonstrates qualification. Software does not have that, so people have to explain their capabilities over and over.

[Signatura]

That’s an interesting comparison... The licensing point highlights how much of the burden in software hiring sits on explanation rather than verification. Without shared baselines, candidates end up narrating their competence instead of pointing to an accepted signal. The expectation gap you describe also explains why requirements feel flexible in practice but rigid on paper. When the real goal is “get someone productive soon,” standards tend to bend quietly rather than evolve explicitly.

Do you think the absence of clear baselines is something the industry could realistically converge on, or is software work too varied for that to work in the way it does for licensed engineering?

[austin-cheney]

Programming is writing logic, which is a universal quality. So the way I would do is to create a fictional programming language, provide some familiarity and training time immediately before a licensing exam (at the testing location), and then having the candidate solve real problems using the fictional language for the licensing exam. It tests for the ability to deliver solutions more than memorizing patterns or reproducing familiar conventions. Too many developers cannot write original logic.

Then there could be additional specialized qualifications above the base qualification, for example: security/certificates/cryptography, experimentation, execution performance, transmission/API management.