Hacker News Reader

Comment by screwturner68 | Hacker News Reader

Doctors are licensed, Plumbers, barbers, Lawyers, what's the issue with people in IT having a standard base of knowledge? One of the big pluses of IT is we supposedly hire people for what they know and not just some bullshit piece of paper but how do we know what they know? Maybe having something like a bar exam or your PE exam, I not saying not to hire people with out a professional license but it could be used as a standard.

View on HN

This type of thing is questionable.

It can be viewed from the other angle. If software engineers aren't licensed why do lawyers and plumbers have to be?

The pros of being licensed are obvious. The cons are less so. One thing licensing does is lower supply. It can be used to artificially lower supply so that prices and wages remain high.

Are you sure barbers are licensed?

>Doctors are licensed, Plumbers, barbers, Lawyers, what's the issue with people in IT having a standard base of knowledge?

It's hard to establish hard standards in an industry that moves as quickly as tech can, but virtually anything would be an improvement over the frat house hazing ritual that technical interviews have become.

Yeah I’m in favor of either one or both (IMO some IT jobs are more like factory work that you’d hope to be unionized, some are more like jobs that you’d expect to be licensed; the border is fuzzy but this is the sort of thing that other fields manage to work out).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com