[overgard]

I guess my concern there is that there's such a high degree of diversity to software jobs that figuring out what "qualified" means is also very diverse. For instance, what it takes to be a frontend web dev vs working on embedded systems vs working as an SRE are practically different professions.

[0xbadcafebee]

The trades are all different professions, and within them are sub-professions. There are apprentice electricians, journeymen electricians, master electricians, electrical engineers, industrial electricians, commercial electricians, residential electricians, new construction electricians, maintenance electricians, US-specific electricians, UK-specific electricians, etc. And we standardized them all. What we didn't do is say "let's not standardize professional electricians because it might take some effort."

It doesn't have to be perfect right off the bat. Start by writing down how you do your job. Get some other people who do your job to review that. And get some more people to review the review. The reviewers note down where there's some gap, something you're not doing, some considerations for doing it, etc. All of it gets updated, consolidated. In a few months you have a document that standardizes your profession.

There are millions of people around the world that write software. Get different groups together to document their own specialties. By parallelizing, we can get a basic set of standards for most specialties in ~1 year.

And don't forget there are already thousands of books on how to do each specialty. It's not like all the knowledge is tribal. It's not really that complicated to explain how software and systems work.