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Accountants, Lawyers, and Surveyors have credentialling bodies that train, test and monitor performance. Accountants don't need to show they are qualified in i

Accountants, Lawyers, and Surveyors have credentialling bodies that train, test and monitor performance. Accountants don't need to show they are qualified in interview because they have the letters ACA, ACCA, CEMA or whatever that they can clearly point to. Lawyers and Surveyors similarly have profession bodies that handle qualification. Software engineering is not uniquely broken but it is broken, but the author jumps to the wrong conclusion. The other engineering and professional disciplines have professional bodies who have official qualifications. Software engineering has never solidified around any particular set of qualifications and many think they are not relevant. And artists are often asked to do some initial work for free before a client commits, they often end up doing a lot of "wasted" work for free without getting properly compensated, so it seems odd to argue that's a model that software should look toward.

pjc50 6y ago
Software has a couple of unique problems which prevent those from working: - the state of the art is both extremely diverse and rapidly moving, so any credential system would run the risk of being too specific and easily out of date. Very few are respected and most existing ones are tied to particular products. Possibly the only set of those that is respected is the Cisco ones. - most of our work is (a) tightly intermingled with the work of others and (b) copyright belongs to our employers, so we can't build portfolios like artists. Many people have contracts that purport to own all code produced, even in your spare time. It would be great if we could take all the basic tests once, upfront, under exam conditions, and then re-use that for years. I can't see how it can be coordinated. Maybe what we need is not a union but a professional body. In the UK we sort of have one (BCS, and more absurdly, the Worshipful Guild Of Informational Technologists) but their impact and benefit is also pretty tiny.
- toyg 6y ago
  > Possibly the only set of those that is respected is the Cisco ones. And that just because their stack is slower-moving. This is a problem that unfortunately is not going to be solved anytime soon, I fear. As industrial revolutions go, we are still in the "mad inventor / amateur / visionary" phase, really. It will take another 50 years before the field slows down enough to solidify into a consistent curriculum. > we can't build portfolios like artists. That's basically what personal Github accounts are, de-facto.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    Yes, but that's not your "professional" work (which is copyright your employer), it's your "amateur" work done in spare time. Which is a pretty exclusionary approach to hiring. It would be very different if more employers paid more than lip service to professional development and encouraged the publication of personal githubs on "work time" as part of that. It sounds like (some of?) the big Bay Area companies do, but those are the ones after the big hiring barrier. The actuaries I know spent a lot of time on exams, but also in their early years got some time set aside by their employers for that.
- ooobit2 6y ago
  Worth mentioning that engineers often build proprietary solutions with proprietary tools and methods. So, while there are a lot of solutions that can be licensed and modified for a use case, the guy or gal building, say, Cisco's WebEx platform can't transfer their skills as readily as the guy or gal deploying, securing and maintaining it within a company. So much of your work has insane barriers to entry, even for internships, that I'm surprised your roles don't come with one or two assistants to manage the mundane business of scheduling meetings, filtering emails, and planning deadlines around out of office time. I got my BS in Cybersecurity, and after a few interviews, I nope-d out of IT as a whole. They'd post preferred certs on the job description (like CCNA) only to ask why I wasn't a CCNP during the first or second interview. Or they'd debate whether some other candidate with a CompTIA cert was better prepared for the $15/hr. internship. And I'm nowhere near the specialization of most engineers. Awesome, awesome work, but it takes a ton of grit to get your foot in the door, and even more grit to switch jobs.
- znpy 6y ago
  > the state of the art is both extremely diverse and rapidly moving I blame this on the tendency to reinvent the wheel instead of fixing the existing one, and the tendency to chase the last new shiny thing of the month.
p2t2p 6y ago
There is bunch of certifications available for devs and/or various scopes of technical knowledge. For some reason all of the people that I've met who are in possession of such a certificate were subpar developers in general. Same with uni degree. I've seen programming olympiad winners writing horrific stuff. On other hand, if I to have a new guy sitting next to me tomorrow which code I will review and support... Well, I'd like to ensure somehow that I won't spend hours and hours on explaining things and that I won't get paged at the midnight because of suck trivial f-up. What's the solution though? I can see anything but just hire the person for a week, 2, may be a month. Give them a boot camp project, observe and then make a decision. That's what happens with lots of interns anyway...
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
There's some "accredited" credentials you can get in software development - I've got one for AWS, for example - but you can get most of those via a multiple choice questionnaire. Having the certification itself means nothing to me; sure, I know in theory how to set up some AWS services, but I have barely any experience in it, and I wouldn't dare to apply to an AWS position because I couldn't actually do it from day 0. I went job hunting last year, and what I was really looking forward is technical interviews - PLEASE just challenge me, allow me to show you my work instead of my CV. I needed technical interviews to fight my impostor syndrome.
- sumo89 6y ago
  "I went job hunting last year, and what I was really looking forward is technical interviews - PLEASE just challenge me, allow me to show you my work instead of my CV" I totally agree. I hate the irony of having a highly technical job but then needing some decent writing skills to put together a CV that isn't just a list of employers, dates and acronyms.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Why shouldn’t you have decent writing skills? There are so many highly skilled developers who get frustrated because their ideas aren’t taken seriously because they don’t communicate well and don’t have any persuasive capabilities. My career was stuck in neutral for a decade before I started working on my interpersonal skills and learned how to navigate corporate politics.
threatofrain 6y ago
But technology is so uncertain past 6 years that successfully making half decent tech bets might mean your specialty is somewhere else. Will GCP certifications still be useful? Should Google be the certifying body for their own technology? When a field is so dependent on proprietary tech, does it make sense to certify people as metaphorical Windows Metro experts?
- scarface74 6y ago
  I keep reading that tech moves so fast that your tech stack becomes out of date. But, if you avoid the front end, it’s not hard to choose the technology that’s the right place on the hype cycle. In 2008, I was looking for a job after being in at one company for nine years. I happen to keep all of my job search emails in a folder by year. Looking at the job reqs for standard enterprise development in 2008, they were looking for either Java, C# or a few were still looking for C++. Java has been in demand since 2000, C# since around 2004 they both still are. As far as databases, the big four were Sql server. Oracle, Mysql and I think Postgres (wasn’t on my radar until 2012). I’ve been going back and forth between Mysql and Sql Server for two decades. Javascript has been in demand since 2002. Definitely by 2008 when employers were asking for “AJAX frameworks”. As far as your examples, it’s not hard to guess that you should stay away from basing your career on anything built on top of Google’s infrastructure (GCP) when they are in third place behind AWS and Azure, and aren’t really making that many inroads into large corporations. As far as Metro, by the time Metro came out, it had been clear for years to avoid desktop development of any kind outside of games if you wanted a technology with broad appeal.

pjc50 6y ago

Software has a couple of unique problems which prevent those from working: - the state of the art is both extremely diverse and rapidly moving, so any credential system would run the risk of being too specific and easily out of date. Very few are respected and most existing ones are tied to particular products. Possibly the only set of those that is respected is the Cisco ones. - most of our work is (a) tightly intermingled with the work of others and (b) copyright belongs to our employers, so we can't build portfolios like artists. Many people have contracts that purport to own all code produced, even in your spare time. It would be great if we could take all the basic tests once, upfront, under exam conditions, and then re-use that for years. I can't see how it can be coordinated. Maybe what we need is not a union but a professional body. In the UK we sort of have one (BCS, and more absurdly, the Worshipful Guild Of Informational Technologists) but their impact and benefit is also pretty tiny.

toyg 6y ago
> Possibly the only set of those that is respected is the Cisco ones. And that just because their stack is slower-moving. This is a problem that unfortunately is not going to be solved anytime soon, I fear. As industrial revolutions go, we are still in the "mad inventor / amateur / visionary" phase, really. It will take another 50 years before the field slows down enough to solidify into a consistent curriculum. > we can't build portfolios like artists. That's basically what personal Github accounts are, de-facto.
- pjc50 6y ago
  Yes, but that's not your "professional" work (which is copyright your employer), it's your "amateur" work done in spare time. Which is a pretty exclusionary approach to hiring. It would be very different if more employers paid more than lip service to professional development and encouraged the publication of personal githubs on "work time" as part of that. It sounds like (some of?) the big Bay Area companies do, but those are the ones after the big hiring barrier. The actuaries I know spent a lot of time on exams, but also in their early years got some time set aside by their employers for that.
ooobit2 6y ago
Worth mentioning that engineers often build proprietary solutions with proprietary tools and methods. So, while there are a lot of solutions that can be licensed and modified for a use case, the guy or gal building, say, Cisco's WebEx platform can't transfer their skills as readily as the guy or gal deploying, securing and maintaining it within a company. So much of your work has insane barriers to entry, even for internships, that I'm surprised your roles don't come with one or two assistants to manage the mundane business of scheduling meetings, filtering emails, and planning deadlines around out of office time. I got my BS in Cybersecurity, and after a few interviews, I nope-d out of IT as a whole. They'd post preferred certs on the job description (like CCNA) only to ask why I wasn't a CCNP during the first or second interview. Or they'd debate whether some other candidate with a CompTIA cert was better prepared for the $15/hr. internship. And I'm nowhere near the specialization of most engineers. Awesome, awesome work, but it takes a ton of grit to get your foot in the door, and even more grit to switch jobs.
znpy 6y ago
> the state of the art is both extremely diverse and rapidly moving I blame this on the tendency to reinvent the wheel instead of fixing the existing one, and the tendency to chase the last new shiny thing of the month.

p2t2p 6y ago

There is bunch of certifications available for devs and/or various scopes of technical knowledge. For some reason all of the people that I've met who are in possession of such a certificate were subpar developers in general. Same with uni degree. I've seen programming olympiad winners writing horrific stuff. On other hand, if I to have a new guy sitting next to me tomorrow which code I will review and support... Well, I'd like to ensure somehow that I won't spend hours and hours on explaining things and that I won't get paged at the midnight because of suck trivial f-up. What's the solution though? I can see anything but just hire the person for a week, 2, may be a month. Give them a boot camp project, observe and then make a decision. That's what happens with lots of interns anyway...

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

There's some "accredited" credentials you can get in software development - I've got one for AWS, for example - but you can get most of those via a multiple choice questionnaire. Having the certification itself means nothing to me; sure, I know in theory how to set up some AWS services, but I have barely any experience in it, and I wouldn't dare to apply to an AWS position because I couldn't actually do it from day 0. I went job hunting last year, and what I was really looking forward is technical interviews - PLEASE just challenge me, allow me to show you my work instead of my CV. I needed technical interviews to fight my impostor syndrome.

sumo89 6y ago
"I went job hunting last year, and what I was really looking forward is technical interviews - PLEASE just challenge me, allow me to show you my work instead of my CV" I totally agree. I hate the irony of having a highly technical job but then needing some decent writing skills to put together a CV that isn't just a list of employers, dates and acronyms.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Why shouldn’t you have decent writing skills? There are so many highly skilled developers who get frustrated because their ideas aren’t taken seriously because they don’t communicate well and don’t have any persuasive capabilities. My career was stuck in neutral for a decade before I started working on my interpersonal skills and learned how to navigate corporate politics.

threatofrain 6y ago

But technology is so uncertain past 6 years that successfully making half decent tech bets might mean your specialty is somewhere else. Will GCP certifications still be useful? Should Google be the certifying body for their own technology? When a field is so dependent on proprietary tech, does it make sense to certify people as metaphorical Windows Metro experts?

scarface74 6y ago
I keep reading that tech moves so fast that your tech stack becomes out of date. But, if you avoid the front end, it’s not hard to choose the technology that’s the right place on the hype cycle. In 2008, I was looking for a job after being in at one company for nine years. I happen to keep all of my job search emails in a folder by year. Looking at the job reqs for standard enterprise development in 2008, they were looking for either Java, C# or a few were still looking for C++. Java has been in demand since 2000, C# since around 2004 they both still are. As far as databases, the big four were Sql server. Oracle, Mysql and I think Postgres (wasn’t on my radar until 2012). I’ve been going back and forth between Mysql and Sql Server for two decades. Javascript has been in demand since 2002. Definitely by 2008 when employers were asking for “AJAX frameworks”. As far as your examples, it’s not hard to guess that you should stay away from basing your career on anything built on top of Google’s infrastructure (GCP) when they are in third place behind AWS and Azure, and aren’t really making that many inroads into large corporations. As far as Metro, by the time Metro came out, it had been clear for years to avoid desktop development of any kind outside of games if you wanted a technology with broad appeal.