Comment by 0xbadcafebee
2 years ago
You really need both. Mandatory education, degrees, apprenticeships, licenses, etc is how you make sure they know how to do the thing. And then the building codes and inspections is how you check that they did the thing. If you ask someone to build a home "to code" but you never teach them how, they will spend years trying to figure it out, inconsistently. Send them to school, have them apprentice, and afterward they will be able to build it in a month, in a standard way.
You remind me, there is an industry that has some basic software building codes: the Defense Industry. There are some pretty thorough standards for IT components, processes, etc needed to work with the military (even in the cloud). But it is all self-attested, so it's like asking a building contractor to make sure they inspect themselves. Government keeps asking the tech industry to solve this, but nobody wants to take responsibility. As more and more stuff falls apart (in the public & private sector) the government is gonna get louder and louder about this. It's already started with privacy & competition, but big failures like Crowdstrike make it obvious that the rot goes deeper.
I agree that the US defense sector is an excellent example of the kind of credentialism in software that you, and the IEEE, are advocating! And the results are dismaying. As Anduril says in https://www.rebootingthearsenal.com/:
> Despite spending more money than ever on defense, our military technology stays the same. There is more AI in a Tesla than in any U.S. military vehicle; better computer vision in your Snapchat app than in any system the Department of Defense owns; and, until 2019, the United States' nuclear arsenal operated off floppy disks. (...) today, in almost every wargame the United States Department of Defense models against China, China wins.
Of course the DoD's problems go much deeper than just credentialism, but credentialism is definitely one of the causes of the disease, not a palliative measure.