41–50 of 79 posts
Why would you want to do that?
One thing that comes to mind is job interviews. When you apply to, say, a surgeon opening, certification and previous job experience is enough, no one asks you to perform homework surgery or list all the bones in human body.
Frankly only a guild cares whether you're a master craftsman. I see greater value to customers in the latter two, especially if S/W products were held to a standard of 'quality', esp efficacy and reliability. Then the S/W dev process could adopt a quality assurance process like that of housing construction, in which a building code exists and defines metrics of product performance that must be met by the builder through iterative inspections and a formal compliance process.
Should such a process exist for all software? No. But I believe it should for some software products, like those in automobiles, medical devices, and essential infrastructure, etc. Do such formal dev processes benefit from their practitioners having some sort of formal certification themselves? Probably not. It's the process and product that's needs certification, not the craftsman.
As a Software Engineering student, I can't decipher whether the comments here are sarcastic or honest.
I'm a Chartered Engineer in the UK and no employer has ever cared. Perhaps they might if I worked in a safety critical arena such as aviation but certainly not in suit and tie business software land. The problem is that although people moan about rubbishy software it very rarely physically hurts anybody and can be fixed in future releases. This means people are unwilling to pay the extra cost of software being more m…
The problem with this is that badly written software actually costs more to write than a properly engineered product. Sure, the initial impulse is cheaper if you hire all greenhorns but after a year? after five years? When the business decides that they want to move from AWS to Azure for X immutable reason?
I would not. As annoying as competition with a lot of people is, it is better then industry wide gatekeeper and resulting politics. IMO, if you think you have good test to distinguish between good and bad, build a company around it.
Here is the Tunisian approach: 1- Let private and public schools be. They can issue their engineering diploma as they like (to a certain extent). 2- Have a national committee that evaluates graduates and gives "national diploma of engineering" based on a number of criteria. 3- Watch the committee slowly become irrelevant as the private sector companies don't care about the national diploma and just wants qualified pe…
The system in France is similar in a way. There are private and public schools, if they are certified, they can issue an Engineering degree but there are non-certified schools who just issue their own diploma. Private sector companies do care about the actual Engineering degree so people who graduate from non-certified schools tend to have a lower starting salary.
I graduated from a non-certified school and my starting salary was higher than friends from a certified school, for an identical software engineering position.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with this is that badly written software actually costs more to write than a properly engineered product. Sure, the initial impulse is cheaper if you hire all greenhorns but after a year? after five years? When the business decides that they want to move from AWS to Azure for X immutable reason?
If technical debt becomes outward facing, the market punishes those involved. As long as technical debt is something engineers complain about but can keep putting the fires out on, then it does make business sense (after a fashion) - a wiser or more apt management might arguably do better, but if it isn't sufficient to make a company uncompetitive then it can at least be argued to be a worthwhile strategy, especially…
I would prefer an apprenticeship system. Possibly have several levels. To get to the next level you would have to create an independent project that you submit to the committee. The committee would review it and then interview you. This would culminate in a master-level project at which point you would be allowed to refer to yourself as a "master programmer". As others have said, there are already engineering societi…
What use is it to be able to create an independent project when 100 per cent of your work consists of delivering implementations according to specifications created by other people, using interfaces created by other people?
Being able to create a single-developer green field project takes you about one fifth the way to being able to survive in large projects (where "large" may also mean a very simple project embedded in layers over layers of process, politics and regulations).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing that comes to mind is job interviews. When you apply to, say, a surgeon opening, certification and previous job experience is enough, no one asks you to perform homework surgery or list all the bones in human body.
They check references. A surgeon has to keep his/her hands wet or face hurdles getting back into any OR.
I understand why those are not enough, but it would be nice not to have to prove you are competent from ground up every time you want to change a job. Hence, certification, etc. But I have no idea how to do it well, though I do hope someone else spends couple of years figuring it out :)