Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) v4.0 is out [pdf]

Every company I go to, the base of knowledge of all the engineers is a complete crapshoot. Most of them lack fundamental knowledge about software engineering. And they all lack fundamental knowledge about the processes used to do the work.

That's not how engineering should work. If I hire an architect, I shouldn't have to quiz them to find out if they understand Young's Modulus, much less teach them about it on the job. But that's completely normal in software engineering today, because nobody is expected to have already learned a universal body of knowledge.

I get this thing isn't perfect. But not being perfect isn't a rational argument for not having one at all. And we certainly need to hold people accountable to have learned it before we give them a job. We need a body of knowledge, it needs to be up to date and relevant, and we need to prove people have actually read it and understood it. If this isn't it, fine, but we still need one.

(this is, by the way, kind of the whole fucking point of a trade school and professional licensing... why the fuck we don't have one for software engineers/IT, boggles my fucking mind, if this is supposed to be the future of work)

While this is true for some engineering fields it's mostly not true and I think that's a good thing because credentialism is bad actually.

Also, architects are not even engineers.

If I want someone to do work, I want them to be licensed/certified. If they are flagrantly unsafe, I want a licensing board or similar to be able to strip that person of their ability to practice that profession. This raises public perception of the profession as a while, avoids a market for lemons, and gives some baseline.

There are too many decisions in life to be able to spend an hour (or more) researching every option. Credentials allow a framework of trust - I don't have to decide if I trust every single engineer; if they have passed their PE exam and not had their certification taken away that is a starting point.

You're just arguing that you want to outsource your own decision making. You actually should interview your candidates before hiring them, whatever credential they have, because it actually is your job to ensure you work with high quality individuals.

Credentialism basically allows the sort of low effort that you're describing and causes many places to rely solely on the credentials, which are obviously never sufficient to find high quality individuals.

What are the jobs you're day dreaming about that require PE exams? I'd bet that requirement is much less common than you think.