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Comment by dagw | Hacker News Reader

I'm waiting for recruiting doctors like that.

Would you want to work in a world where all programmers have to be trained, licensed and regulated with the same rigor as surgeons?

Surely the fact that programming is one of the few 'white collar' jobs where someone with no education and no relevant work experience can get hired based purely on the fact that they've taught themselves the necessary skills and can do the job is a net good thing.

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> Would you want to work in a world where all programmers have to be trained, licensed and regulated with the same rigor as surgeons?

Uh, yes...

There are too many terrible developers out there.

Yes exactly that. The problem is that anyone can stitch a leg back on. We need people who can stitch the leg back on and the patient not die 3 months later or the leg fall off again.

If you look at other engineering disciplines there are formal structured approaches to education and testing leading to chartered engineers etc. We could really do with the same.

At the moment we have certifications which merely prove that the individual can pass an exam. I can routinely get near 100% on these sorts of test without knowing the subject or having any experience.

The ability to build a top tier career from self-teaching is remarkable. It would be such a tragedy if this was stripped and replaced with a signalling based equilibrium run and/or structured by the government :(

Very true. These people literally don't know what they're talking about, or what they're asking for. They've thought their plan through about five seconds into the future.

Either that, or they're blatant featherbedders who aren't bothering to disclose their interests.

In neither case do they belong on this site.

So you either use no commercial software at all, or you're happy paying a hundred times what you paid for it, and doing so in return for the privilege of running 1980s-era applications in 2018.

Agreed.

I want to live in a world when we have normal recruitment process for programmers. I have about 17 years of experience. And really my university grades are not important (yes, some companies want to see that). In all places where I worked I knew databases much more than all other people together, I organized training for them etc. Despite my database-oriented CV, I'm always asked basic database questions usually asked by someone who doesn't understand them, and then doesn't understand my answers. I also got some stupid IQ tests with multiple good answers (however exactly one was in the key).

I can talk about bad recruitment processes for hours. I just want to meet competent recruiters, and managers - just like they want to find a competent candidate.

> where all programmers have to be trained, licensed and regulated with the same rigor as surgeons?

Yes. Please, God, yes.

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