Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

61–62 of 62 posts

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

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is, unless you happen to be named Null. Which is a surprisingly common surname.

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

#62
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mission critical software is created by processes, not individuals. I worked on software for the military, which was under a process (heavily regimented, I might add), and yet US soldiers still died when the software failed. It wasn't one person with a keyboard, it was a group decision and politics that allowed it to happen. Processes in the end are still run by people. Sometimes people do the thing they think is r…

Adding certification to the mix won't fix the faulty process at all though.

If you don't have an audit trail of the decisions made, you can't fix the problem.
Post reply on HN