Comment by 0xbadcafebee
13 hours ago
Actually it's not even years of experience, I've seen grads with 2 yrs experience promoted to Senior with a minor raise because otherwise they might leave the company.
Licensed professionals don't have identity crises, their titles and what is required of them is legally enforced. The software industry has never lobbied for the interests of "engineers", the way other professions have (taxi drivers, barbers, plumbers, real estate agents, etc formed professional groups which lobbied for laws requiring official licensing). I think it's because software developers are the laziest people on the planet, and they are happy to continue doing almost nothing in order to get hired.
(I support licensing)
Licensing never happened because its effect is to reduce the size of the labor pool and restrict what the labor pool can do as individuals. Barring the very recent abberation of the glut of new grads and not enough junior positions, even without licensing, there haven't been enough engineers to fill all the open senior-level positions. Licensure would make that problem worse.
A licensure board would also get embroiled in political disputes over what is genuinely ethical. Python is a performance nightmare, should engineers be permitted to pick a language with known poor performance characteristics? Electron is a RAM hog and battery-killer, is it an ethical choice? So how could any Python or Electron shop support licensure?
Isn't a comp-sci degree the barely relevant "license" in IT?