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180 points beryilma | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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0xbadcafebee ◴[] No.41909738[source]
There appears to be a lot of hate towards this in the comments (because it's not perfect?), but I feel strongly that we need explicit bodies of knowledge, along with certifications for having been trained on it.

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)

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1. osigurdson ◴[] No.41910982[source]
What are you hoping professional licensing might do for you? I can attest that outside of traditional engineering fields, licensing is completely useless and confers roughly the same level of prestige as a Costco membership. I'll send you my engineering ring in the mail if you like (Canada's cheesy contribution to engineering culture).