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Ask HN: What obstacles stand in the way for a “bar exam” for programming jobs?

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Re: Ask HN: What obstacles stand in the way for a “bar exam” for programming jobs?

#31

Post by barry-cotter »

PeterisP wrote: post #25

What makes bar exams work is an industry-wide agreement that they won't allow you to do the work if you haven't passed the bar exam. It seems that it's not (and will not be) in the best interests of most employers to disqualify people who haven't passed such an exam but otherwise seem able to do the work. Thus an effective "bar exam" can not arise voluntarily, since the required factor - motivation by a critical mass…

What makes bar exams work is not an industry wide agreement, it’s government licensing. I’m sure there are plenty of paralegals who are perfectly capable of doing standard, ordinary legal work like conveyancing or ensuring the registry of deeds is updated when property is sold. But there can be only one kind of legal practitioner with US government licensing as it stands. Anything else is illegal and you’ll go to jail for practicing law without a licence.

Re: Ask HN: What obstacles stand in the way for a “bar exam” for programming jobs?

#32

Post by shiado »

I would argue that the very nature of the math behind programming is cause for it not to be regulated easily. In other applied fields you don't run up against undecidable problems and Rice's theorem. If it is not possible to mathematically certify that a particular program has a particular property how can you regulate the programmers? Only allow them non-Turing complete languages?

Re: Ask HN: What obstacles stand in the way for a “bar exam” for programming jobs?

#33

Post by gautamnarula »

et-al wrote: post #7

You would need a professional organisation to lobby for laws, but I don't see engineers in the industry coming together and forming one. Professional organisations were a way to keep people out of a field by requiring them to have the connections or the money to afford the study materials and exam fees. And don't forget continuing education costs as well. This concept would turn away many of the anti-establishment ty…

In addition to TripleByte, there seen to be an increasing number of companies that require HackerRank online timed coding assessments as the first technical filter before you get to ever speak to an engineer.

Re: Ask HN: What obstacles stand in the way for a “bar exam” for programming jobs?

#34

Post by dasil003 »

analog31 wrote: post #27
hapless wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could raise my wages. Being a doctor was a rather modest middle income wage until the AMA came along to raise barriers to entry.

I'm not sure about that. The thing about doctors is that people don't decide not to get sick. With programming, if regulation of the industry dampens innovation, it might reduce the demand for software, and consequently, depress wages.

Under the current paradigm where wealth is steadily and increasingly being consolidated to the owners of automation, I don't think demand will decrease until the singularity, which is still a long way off, if even possible given our current resource consumption.

Re: Ask HN: What obstacles stand in the way for a “bar exam” for programming jobs?

#35

Post by barry-cotter »

grandmczeb wrote: post #18
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Professional exams oftentimes cover subjects like ethics, which would undoubtedly help the industry

Is there evidence that people actually act more ethically after taking a class on ethics?

Not that I know of but there’s evidence professional ethicists behave no more ethically than other philosophers.

Ethicists’ and Nonethicists’ Responsiveness to Student E‐mails: Relationships Among Expressed Normative Attitude, Self‐Described Behavior, and Empirically Observed Behavior

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/meta.12033

Re: Ask HN: What obstacles stand in the way for a “bar exam” for programming jobs?

#36

Post by garyfirestorm »

What prevents a general exam? - Attitude

Unlike other fields, Engineering in general and software in particular are all about freedom. You can hack your car, hack your phone, WiFi etc without needing a certificate from someone. You're challenging this freedom and hacker attitude by imposing exams and creating a system that gives people 'permission' to write software (work in this field)

This will never fly. And I hope it never does.

Re: Ask HN: What obstacles stand in the way for a “bar exam” for programming jobs?

#37

Post by platinumrad »

allemagne wrote: post #30
tylercubell wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software that could kill. Medical, aerospace, driverless?

Software that could kill is a small subset of overall software being written, but software that can arguably ruin or at least cause moderate havoc on people's lives (via PII) encompasses maybe a majority of jobs in the software industry [citation needed]. I don't know that having a "bar exam" is the best way to approach that problem, either. I think laws need to be written that cripple companies that don't follow bes…

A large amount (a majority maybe even?) of software written outside of Silicon Valley is "boring" business logic-y stuff that has a very limited ability to impact anyone's lives in a meaningful way.

I haven't thought too deeply about this but the solution to the PII exposure problem, in my opinion, is to heavily disincentivize entities from holding any data that they don't absolutely need to (probably via punishingly them heavily for slipping up).

Re: Ask HN: What obstacles stand in the way for a “bar exam” for programming jobs?

#38

Post by nokcha »

If you're suggesting a law against hiring people who have not passed such an exam, the First Amendment would likely be an obstacle (just as the government cannot impose an licensure requirement on journalists), since source code is protected speech. However, in safety-critical systems (such as self-driving cars), the government probably can impose a regulation against using code developed by an unlicensed programmer in production.

If you're suggesting a de facto industry-standard exam, I think there just isn't enough wide agreement about what should be on the exam.

Re: Ask HN: What obstacles stand in the way for a “bar exam” for programming jobs?

#39

Post by kbaker »

jadedhacker wrote: post #28
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Professional exams oftentimes cover subjects like ethics, which would undoubtedly help the industry

Teaching ethics won't help, but providing financial and social support for dissidents would. So would requiring members to adhere to an ethics pledge that can get their membership revoked if they fail to comply. The numerous repeated calls for ethics pledges taken by individuals I see on this site betrays a misunderstanding of how power works. Individuals can't fight the system alone, it takes a collective.

The membership revocation is key - the fact that you could lose your professional license for ethics violations is enough to keep everything above board. Also, the NSPE would provide support for an individual engineer in the dissident/whistleblower case.

As an Electrical Engineer, we went over this in school, as ethics is one of the cornerstones of the Professional Engineer license. (Though, personally I am not professionally licensed.)

See here for what it covers: https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics

Re: Ask HN: What obstacles stand in the way for a “bar exam” for programming jobs?

#40

Post by awat »

tylercubell wrote: post #3
platinumrad wrote: post #2

Why do you think that increasing the barriers of entry into software work is a good idea?

Software that could kill. Medical, aerospace, driverless?

I would think that accountibility would probably be equally if not more helpful in these situations. If a document was signed stating liability similar to Sarbanes Oxley for CFOs those who would be cutting corners would likely do the thorough vetting of credentials themselves.
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