HVAC has certifications you can get. We should strongly consider this in our industry. I don't think its an unreasonable compromise, especially now with the advent of LLMs.
We have some certs. The problem is that software development is about thirty different skills in a trench coat, and half of them we don't know how to evaluate (like slicing, or abstraction.)
What ends up happening is that our certs end up being a bunch of multiple-choice questions that check people's ability to memorize trivia.
It is more like having a Certified Novel Writer or Certified Mural Painter or Certified Graphic Designer certificate than it is like HVAC or welding.
It would be nice if there was at least a bare bones certificate that guaranteed the candidate knows at least some absolutely minimal baseline, like what a for loop and if statement is. You’d still have to interview the candidate but you wouldn’t have to start at Hello World or FizzBuzz.
I have interviewed at least one self-described Senior Software Engineer who didn’t know how to write a function that takes an integer parameter and then prints every integer from 0 to the argument passed.
People do take university courses in doing creative stuff, a fair number of sucessful novelists seem to have done one, RPG proposed that we could have something similar for software [1].
In regular systems administration, having certs kinda suggested that you didn't have the chops to get a job without a cert. Even people who had them would only include them on the resume when they were explicitly called for in a job description.
With the rise of "DevOps" and throwing half your raise at Amazon, the job moved away from being able to build and run networks of computers. Now it is mostly about configuring off-the-shelf tools in "the cloud". In that world, certs became way more meaningful. Sure, the AWS cert is just testing if you know the six different names Amazon has given one feature, but it is potentially more helpful to know that trivia than it is to actually understand LDAP or DNS.
If AI successfully de-skills software development, maybe certs will finally become useful for developers too.
I think in part, the difference in what I mean about certification (perhaps licensure is better word here) is an industry body - accepted and respected generally by the businesses within our industry - that will demonstrate some form of competence
I would love to see a trade union-style group, where you are sponsored to join by an existing member and expected to do some work along side existing members before being certified as journey-level and recommended to employers.
It would require that group to agree on what being a "good" developer meant, but there could be more than one and if you don't agree with this one you could form your own. Maybe one requires people to be able to write testable code and be able to label design patterns, and another expects pure functional programming, and another expects deep security expertise, and companies could know which of those they are looking for and inquire appropriately.
We have this a little bit with employers like Pivotal or ThoughtWorks, that have such strong learning cultures you can be sure that if someone spent five years there they know their stuff. But we could have a version where workers were willing to endorse each other, rather than relying on a specific for-profit company.
It is, like all certifications, only as valuable as the least-competent person who holds it. But the informal versions of this are pretty powerful.
I'd rather it be like passing the bar, accounting exams (CPA etc) or actuarial exams. They test very relevant deep knowledge and act as a proof of fundamentals - and software engineer does have technical fundamentals that could just as well be tested for in a meaningful way.
If we can divide the industry into many small subindustries, each with their own licensing, maybe. If we want to treat it as the one big industry like we do right now, no chance. We won't even be able to find agreement on surface level things, never mind the nitty gritty.
> We should strongly consider this in our industry.
These were very hot for system admins in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Is it still a thing today? Do high quality employers still care about these certs in 2025? I doubt it.
HVAC has certifications you can get. We should strongly consider this in our industry. I don't think its an unreasonable compromise, especially now with the advent of LLMs.