Ask HN: Why isn't there a professional body for Computer Science?
What I want to know is why have other related areas of study such as Statistics, Economics, Actuarial Science and Operations Research been able to organize professional bodies that can determine competence. There are other professional bodies where they don't give credentials but they organize a central location for candidates and organizations to come together and they provide a standardized format to determine competence.
I find this especially baffling now that "data science" has become a buzzword. Lots of "data science" techniques such as:
- Generalized Linear Modeling
- Gradient Boosted Machines
- Support Vector Machines
- Random Forrests
- The Simplex Algorithm
- Anything with the word Bayes or Markov in the title
were developed by Statisticians/Mathematicians. Even though hospitals and insurance companies and the Fed and logistics companies are able to find statisticians/operations researchers/ predictive modelers/ etc. with out problems why do tech companies such as AirBnB(https://www.quora.com/How-does-Airbnb-hire-data-scientists) say they HAVE to give these multi-day long technical screens with multiple homework assignments?
What is it about applying the same techniques to tech that makes them special and some how harder to measure?
73 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 45.4 ms ] threadThere is
http://www.acm.org/
which supports the academic CS establishment but frankly has a "devil may care" attitude about practitioners. CACM is full of hand-wringing articles about the roller-coastering numbers of CS undergrads and they never once get a clue that the undergrads hear rumours about what happens to people in computing once the flush of youth wears off. (It's a general thing that engineers start out with good pay but hit a glass ceiling rapidly)
I used to be a member but I quit because of this. If I had to point to a particular issue it is that the ACM has unquestioning support of increasing H-1B visas.
I am a member of the IEEE Computer Society precisely because they take the opposite side.
Personally it is not a litmus test for me, I see there are two sides of the issue, but when you look at the ACM they are in lockstep with the industry which sees it as a one-sided issue and anybody who questions it is like one of those brits that likes to brawl at football matches.
Anti-professionalism (that is, active opposition and resistance to professionalism) is the dominant paradigm in IT and it creates "market for lemons" situations that has a number of negative impacts on the field, the worst of which is that once you do get the job (well paid or not) you will almost inevitably be forced into malpractice by management and not have anybody to support you.
If there was a simple explanation of the situation it is that computing came along in a time when unions were on the run. Had computers became widespread 20 or 30 years earlier, the situation might be very different.
WWII was the catalyst for a lot of technical research. It spawned the birth of the modern computer with Turing and it also saw the birth or what is now considered modern Operations Research. For example, during WWII George Dantzig (the person that developed the Simplex Algorithm) served in the U.S. Air Force Office of Statistical Control. He only returned to finish his PhD at Berkeley after the was was over. Also a lot of work with Bayesian search started developing around this time to do things like help search for enemy subs.
However INFORMS is very involved in the OR/MS community and multiple times per year they host meetings where one of the goals is to connect grad students with companies.
When I was in school, the local ACM chapter had meetings which which even helped undergraduates find internships and jobs.
All of the major ACM conferences have a job fair. Most of the minor ones as well.
> "What is it about applying the same techniques to tech that makes them special"
There is nothing special about tech. The same is true for most fields. Where is your central source where you can hire a chemist?
Usually, the potential chemist hire comes to the site, talks to people, gives a job talk, etc.
> "say they HAVE to give these multi-day long technical screens"
The link you gave to AirBNB says it's one day technical screen, and candidates which pass that screen have a followup with four non-tech interviews. It is not a "multi-day long technical screen".
The problem is that computing careers tend to be dead end jobs in the long term.
Like seriously, you get hired into Google and where are you going to go? Become a product manager? Really? Academics get to look like they are doing positive when they are running something just as exploitative as the Thoroughbred racing industry.
Job fairs are also as much as a part of the problem as they are part of the solution. For instance, Google and Facebook are far more likely to send recruiters to the moon than they are to send them to a historically black college.
You know, people can have an entirely good life without having to climb a career ladder. Going back a tech-generation, and thinking of a friend, after you work at NeXT and AutoCAD, you go to a small plastics manufacturing company and with team of two others, manage their IT systems. It pays well, has good benefits, is 10 minutes commute, has diverse challenges, and he loves that they make actual physical things. What's wrong with that?
Also, http://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2015/0505/Google-sends-i... : "In an effort to assist in Silicon Valley's diversity problem, Google has sent some of its engineers to historically black colleges to shake up the system."
As far as I know, Google has not yet sent anyone to the Moon.
If we stick with AirBnB here is a posting they made with the AEA (https://www.aeaweb.org/joe/listing.php?JOE_ID=2015-02_111454...).
All of the interviewing takes place at the AEA meeting and the candidate is expecting to have their Job Market paper (a completed technical project that is used for presenting at all of your interviews).
The American Statistical Association has something similar with their Joint Statistical Meeting (https://www.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2016/employerlist.cfm).
Once I finish grad school I wouldn't do any type of homework for a job interview. If you can't read one of my papers then I just wouldn't be interested.
There are references to check up on. There's the ability to present your job talk; the ability to present is an important skill when you work in a company. Some candidates during the interview day might yell at a secretary or send text messages while being interviewed - these are two no-go indicators for most jobs.
Those two examples come from a comment at http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/11/03/job... . Another points out a technical screening question one might ask a chemist:
> If I ask a PhD candidate how many protecting groups they know for nitrogen and they can name ten off the top of their head with pros and cons for each – then that tells me something. If all they can come up with is “Ummmm… Boc?” – well that tells me something too.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2006/01/29/nam... suggests:
> I think I might work up some questions like that for the next time I interview someone. “Here,” I’ll say, handing over a sheet of paper. “SciFinder says that you can do this reaction any of these six ways. Which one would you recommend trying first, and why?”
A recent grad comments about a job interview, with questions "more along the lines of “do you know some basic transformations and how they occur?”
Given that evidence that there are technical screens for chemists, why do you write fields "especially outside of tech ... don't have independent technical screens", and that interviewers only look at one's single paper publication?
You write: "If we stick with AirBnB".
If we stick with AirBNB then re-read the interview process you linked to earlier. Not only does it not do multiple days of technical screening, as you thought, but it says nothing about a homework assignment; which seems to be a particular point of irritation for you.
You appear to have an incorrect interpretation of what you read, and an incorrect interpretation of what happens in other fields. I suggest that means you may need to re-evaluate what you think you know of the topic.
I'm specifically talking about other technical fields that are highly mathematical and that have a lot in common with Computer Science.The fields that I specifically mentioned were Statistics, Economics, Actuarial Science and Operations Research. I mentioned all of the fields that I'm talking about in the original post and in sever of my replies. You are harping on something trying to correct a point that I'm not even trying to make and your response actually helps to further prove my point. You could be correct about the Chemistry thing. I didn't study Chemistry and I don't want to be a Chemist and I didn't mention the subject anywhere in my OP, so I don't really care about the interview process for hiring a Chemist.
For example, with Economics (one of the fields that I actually mentioned), presenting your "Job Paper" is actually part of the interview process. You make your presentation and everybody that has arranged an interview with you can come by and hear your talk. They can read your paper before hand so they have time to think questions well ahead of time. The American Economics Association provides one platform for all interested parties to come together and hash things out instead of me having to try and go to 10 separate interviews.
With Actuaries (another field that I actually mentioned) there is no need for you to quiz me to see if I actually know how a Poisson Process o GLMs work because that is taken care of by the exam process. If somebody passed the Statistical Models exam then you know that they at least meet the industry agreed upon minimum competency level for knowledge of specific Statistical Models.
This is, I think, equivalent to the FizzBuzz problem that was going around a few years ago. I can see how it can be called homework. I assume it's a screen because a lot of people apply who have no clue on what data science is actually about. If my assumption is correct, the it should take no more than 15 minutes or so, since it's supposed to be "easy."
You write now "and takes place over several days". Earlier you wrote "multi-day long technical screens with multiple homework assignments." These are two different, though related things. My response was to your first description, not your updated description.
Here are the differences I see. 1) the AirBNB text says "We send a few datasets to them and ask a basic question; the exercise should be easy for anyone who has experience." The use of 'the exercise' looks like it's one homework assignment, while you say it's "multiple homework assignments". This is a minor point, but still a difference.
2) the AirBNB text says that the in-house challenge is a day long ("They then have the day ... At the end of the day"). That is the main technical screen. The remaining day is a non-technical screen. I agree that it's a multi-day long process, but only one of those days is for technical screening. This is why I disagree with your initial characterization of "multi-day long technical screens", though I agree with your new characterization of "takes place over several days".
> "I'm specifically talking about other technical fields that are highly mathematical and that have a lot in common with Computer Science. ... so I don't really care about the interview process for hiring a Chemist."
I was addressing your earlier statement "What is it about applying the same techniques to tech that makes them special and some how harder to measure?"
In comparing your two sentences, I'm confused. You first imply that CS is "tech" and somehow special, and different from statistics and the other fields. But now you say they have a lot in common? What does "special" even mean then?
Most of CS, by the way, has very little mathematics in it. Surely less than chemistry does. Why do you think CS is "highly mathematical" when most CS departments require only basic calculus, discrete math 2, and perhaps an intro. statistics course? (Some specialized subfields of course require more mathematics.)
I'm "harping" on the topic because you think CS is somehow special, when my experience from physics, chemistry, and bioinformatics says that the CS hiring method is pretty standard.
I believe the hiring process in mathematics is also similar to the science fields I just listed, and different from what you have described.
For example, http://www.siam.org/pdf/news/1847.pdf describes the process for "recent PhDs who are looking for positions at undergraduate-focused schools". It includes a strong teaching component, so the interviewees are expected to put together a talk with "the daunting task of showing that you can connect with an audience of undergraduates and non-specialists while simultaneously making it clear that you’re a serious mathematician, knowledgeable about your area and with substantial work to your credit."
http://blogs.siam.org/how-and-why-to-ask-good-questions-duri... says "In the U.S., the typical interview for a PhD-level position lasts a full day or more, including a one-hour seminar and one-on-one meetings with researchers and/or faculty as well as managers/administrator...
If you plan working in predictive modeling at an insurance company you will have to get credentialed by one of the two actuarial societies. The SOA just added more exams to their current schedule to cover various predictive modeling topics and the CAS decided to make the predictive modeling portion a separate credential. But this way, you do everything once and it is valid across most English speaking countries. It doesn't matter whether you want to work at AllState, ESurance or Liberty Mutual. They just pull your record with one of the Actuarial societies.
I was saying that depending on what you specialize in they do have a lot in common. Given that you have similar specialties, why are economists and actuaries and statisticians able to judge a persons competence in some sort of standardized way but a tech company trying to hire someone in Machine Learning or Data Mining isn't able to do the same?
Including, as I mentioned, ones organized by the ACM and IEEE. Here's the ACM's stepping-off point for graduating students: https://www.acm.org/education/resources-for-grads . They have a twice monthly publication called CareerNews. The ACM links to the many resources available for getting an idea of pay scales in different parts of the country.
At this point, I don't know what to say. Yes, a few fields have credentialed requirements, ranging from haircutter to certified public accountant to lawyer to surgeon to engineer.
Most do not.
For example, if you plan working in predictive modeling at drug discovery company, no such credentials exist. Moreover, a credential from an actuarial society will almost worthless, and surely less important than a MS in biostatistics.
You keep coming back to: "why are economists and actuaries and statisticians able to judge a persons competence in some sort of standardized way".
Shrug I know nothing about those fields. For all I know, it's because there is a well-known set of laws and regulations they have to follow, and generally accepted practices, so most of the need for competence is to ensure that people know those laws and practices.
That's not the case for most fields. Including computer science, in all of its forms and incarnations.
This fragmentation implies that Computer Science really is too broad an umbrella. For sure, there is a lot of process related general software development knowledge that all of the above should possess. But most projects won't suffer an experienced developer's learning curve on a new sub-specialty, even if it only means a few months.
Do Statistics, Economics, Actuarial Science and Operations Research have a similar attribute?
In addition to that all of the other fields that I mentioned have sub-specialties as well. An actuary can be a life, health or P&C actuary. They can work in reinsurance or predictive modeling. An economist can work in Financial Economics or Labor markets or Econometrics/Quatitative Methods.
Yet the SOA/CAS are able to come up with and evaluate a set of minimum competencies that insurance companies in most English speaking countries are able to agree on. The American Economics Association is able to bring together major international banks (Various branches of the Fed, The World Bank, Various National Banks, Consulting Companies, Law firms that specialize in Financial/Economics issues) and grad students and it gives them a common format to get to know each other and evaluate job offers regardless of a candidate's/company's specialty.
Isn't that the job of my employer, anyway?
It also seems like it is also more common for actuaries, statisticians, Industrial Engineers to do independent consulting where they are employed as an independent professional and will be required to carry things like insurance. In cases like that, there really isn't any place that acts as "your employer". Instead, you are independently providing your services to a client.
Or if not flaming wreckage, then major corporate failures, particularly if they are banks.
It's coming. Just a matter of time.
Programming (which is different from CS, but is often mixed) is very accessible to learn (all you need is a computer and Internet), because of which it grew very fast and got democratized very quickly.
No professional body was able to catch up to the speed of growth and breadth of penetration. Before the talent crunch hit, it was too late.
I wish I could find some relevant numbers for growth, penetration and ubiquity of programming to support this claim. But for those of us in the industry for a while now (6 years of education + 15 years of working), there is a lot of anecdotal evidence. e.g. I was booed in 1996, for choosing CS as my major. And now every Taxi company out there needs software engineers.
Yes, you can have a good product if you have a very strict spec, written by true experts that really know what they're doing. Otherwise forget about it
>No one took design and security too seriously. They still don't.
To some degree, but the whole idea of Agile is very test-based: Write something, see if it works, toss it if it doesn't. That's not a hard workflow to integrate security auditing and testing into: It's just another kind of testing, if a slower one.
Given, you are right about this kind of thing being highly anti-planning. As to whether that's a bad thing, I don't know.
However, I can safely say that it's better than some alternatives. There is no way epoll would have gotten through a proper testing in its present state.
So yes, I thing these are big problems, but casting the blame on agile is like saying that a large dog ate your bed: He might have wrecked it a bit, or maybe not, but he couldn't have eaten the entire thing.
What if an architect could specify an entire skyscraper, push a button, and have it manifest in the real world in 30 seconds? What if they could slightly tweak something about the plumbing, push the button again, and have the old thing torn down and the new building put up? What if they could push another button to put 10 times the rated mass on every floor to see what happens? What if they could push another button to summon an 8.3 magnitude earthquake for ten minutes? What if they could write a for loop that did that for every .1 magnitude increment, ten times a day, until the building collapses, and gathered statistics on which buildings do the best?
Do you think maybe this would affect their design process a bit? Maybe just a little?
If you stop and seriously think about it, you should expect that programmers have a very different optimum design methodology. It would be crazy if we didn't!
Now, there are good practices and there are bad practices, and the bad practices are more widespread than they should be, and there are cowboys where there should be engineers. However, based on the prevalence of posts like this, I have little confidence in the ability of a "professional organization" to improve things. It seems based on the evidence far, far more likely to mandate counterproductive practices that make software more expensive, less reliable, and harder for the disadvantaged and underprivileged to get into.
Don't be envious of the other engineering disciplines. They envy us.
They shouldn't. Our work is deplorable. Any non-trivial internal codebase would probably give any mathematically savvy engineer nightmares for days. If our office buildings were designed as needlessly hastily the software designed inside them, having our tech hub in an earthquake hotspot would be a serious issue.
Yes, there is something to be said about the convenience of our "agile"/rapid-development cycle, but it's not like we use that power responsibly. We have enough decades-old codebases that have been in a perpetual state of 'fragile legacy-code' since they were first written, that prove that we don't take our designs seriously enough to improve them despite all our conveniences. If building engineers suddenly had access to some magical 'easy-bake oven' for building skyscraper MVP's and making 'agile' changes, I know I'd be concerned, looking back at our track record with software.
They're objective is, does it work? Then don't change it.
You have to remember software is incredibly complicated due to the amount of possible states it can be in.
Same deal with "software engineer". I know that PEO (Ontario), APEGA (Alberta) and OIQ (Quebec) are pretty strict on this; Google's devs at the K-W and Montreal offices are known as "software developers", as a result: https://www.google.com/about/careers/search#!t=jo&jid=324000...
Recently APEGBC has been cracking down as well. The main problem is that there are only 100 registered Professional Software Engineers here in BC, out of 50,000 registered Professional Engineers and Geoscientists. Because you can't get your PEng without working under another PEng first, the deck is stacked against "software engineers" using the Valley/Puget Sound definition. HootSuite now uses the term "software developer", but some of the more prolific companies in Vancouver (Amazon, Microsoft, Tableau, Mobify) still use the term "engineer" in positions, even for positions that don't exclusively need licensed engineers/geoscientists.
I am a software engineer.
And as it happens I work for a famously, even notoriously, doctrinaire agile company: Pivotal. Which is the first place I've worked which actually felt like I'm engineering instead of coding.
Team fit is what makes people shine in their jobs and no one is asking about it... The industry is well developed now for us to stop asking about reversing binary trees and start asking about how many friends you one had in high school
Could you explain?
In my experience a very large proportion of programmers have not completed any formal training, which is typically the first step in the other professional accreditation processes.
The attempts to put real engineering into "software engineering" and real science into "computer science" is strongly resisted by many. ACM and IEEE deplore this state of affairs but are unable to bring about any widespread change in attitudes.
Because they don't want to admit they've become trade schools for white collar workers. They even advertise themselves as such, "training for the real world". The real world needs more software developers than computer scientists.
Because at the moment, anything computer related is something you can teach yourself through practice and experience rather than something that necessarily needs a degree or credentials. You can obvious get a degree or what not, but it's not required.
The worry however is that professionalism could lead to a situation like with doctors or lawyers, where you need to be part of some professional body or have certain credentials to work in the field at all. And that it could make getting work in the field more difficult for newcomers as a result.
Unfortunately, for this to work it requires informed leadership. I have seen senior leadership of many orgs grant essentially limitless power to "IT guys" who can't function outside the warm blanket of Microsoft services and are responsible for multi-billion $ enterprises without being able to recognize an SQL statement.
We can't have a professional accreditation, because there is no right or wrong best practice in computing. Obviously, making programs that are buggy and incomplete w.r.t their specifications is wrong, but if you don't do that, there is no one right way.
Evidence?
With programming, you can write programs that use statistical analysis and modeling. But you can write programs that do things that are far less mathematical in nature. A web developer could create a content-focused website, including the backend and devops code. If said developer is far more focused on the content and less on the code (e.g. not much more than setting up WordPress and writing CS/JS and maybe some custom PHP), why should they have to get accredited for that?
It's not that math and statistics are lesser fields, but that computer science (or rather, what's commonly associated with it, such as programming) is a far more versatile and creative field. The difference between being accredited to write a legal opinion, and being a writer in general. But we don't credentialize writing.
Lets look at the salary of Actuaries shall we ?
£ 222,936 - Chief actuary, senior partner
£ 140,814 - Senior function head, practice director
£ 117,343 - Function head, practice head
£ 89,442 - Department manager, managing consultant
£ 80,664 - Section manager, senior consultant
£ 73,043 - Section leader, consultant
£ 66,118 - Senior actuary, junior consultant
£ 52,067 - Actuary
£ 36,241 - Student actuary
£ 33,130 - Recent graduate
Each level is incremental - X amount of work increases your salary by Y amount.
All you need to do pass the exams and you can work in USA + Canada + Europe + India + Australia !
Now being a Chief Actuary is quite improbable - but look at the salary ! how probable is it that a programmer is going to earn that much after 25 years of experience ? we have all heard stories of unemployed experience engineers.
Coming from a maths background I really want some answers as to why I choose software engineering
To me the rampant unprofessionalism, the lack of structure, the insane amount of discrimination that is normal due to age, race, gender.
I really want to rage quit and go back and became an actuary due to lack of options for career progression.
For reference, starting compensation for a 22-year-old fresh CS graduate in the Bay Area is $120k+ (higher than department manager in your list). 5 years in as an individual contributor or tech lead you'd be doing $150-$200k. My roommate was in actuarial and got the hell out when he saw the difference. Now he's a 'data scientist' and doesn't need standardized exams or accreditation to get a job.
Also: have noticed the sheer amount of sickening hatred of immigrants in this thread? These entitled pricks think that they're the only ones deserving of an opportunity to live and work in the US (because they were "born here"), and they think everyone else should be kept out. It continues to amaze me how much contempt and hatred there is for immigrants, here on HN.
The way it works it seems is that companies are willingly to take the risk if you have proven yourself very well outside of america.
But I agree somewhat, that software engineering is not the field, where you are likely to be able to have a career.
One would have to win the H-1B lottery (~25% odds), find a job in February/March/April of a year; find a company that is willing to wait for 6-8 months, and move to the U.S. in October (if they win the lottery).
In tech today (esp. in the Bay Area of NYC), it won't be that hard to find a job and a company willing to apply for the visa and wait for 6-8 months, if you can show you're a good programmer -- but there's no way to avoid the lottery.
And there are European offices for many of the BigCo's. Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Spotify, and Google all have European engineering offices (just off the top of my head).
Finally, there's also remote work.
Really no reason to be envious of an actuary's £33,130 starting salary.
I'm no closer to understanding.
edit: I took the swear words out of my query and got a better answer.
"a person who compiles and analyzes statistics and uses them to calculate insurance risks and premiums."
Any sort of test to determine professional membership eligibility will either have to be pure theory (useless) or else sectarian (favoring practitioners who develop under a particular platform, or using particular approaches).
Neither of those disciplines has much correlation to general software development, so they fail from the start.
Engineers have an "industrial exemption," where they can work without a license, if they do engineering for an employer. Rather than having things designed by licensed engineers, the work is completed, and then a licensed engineer signs off on it. Design review is often outsourced. For instance when we're ready to ship a product (an electronic measurement instrument), we hire a testing firm to approve the design.
Better watch what you ask for: If you look at the actual work that licensed engineers do, most of us would say that it's incredibly repetitious and boring -- basically poring over someone else's work all day long. I'd go nuts. I also couldn't be a patent lawyer for that reason. On the other hand, it's well paid and secure. A relative of mine had a long and rewarding career as a licensed nuclear power plant operator. In practical terms, he was a project manager.
New things are developed and become widespread before professional bodies can even react. I learned about microcomputers under the mentorship of my physics professors, while the CS department at my college was 100% mainframe focused. The CS majors laughed at my "toy computer." The early pioneers of Embedded Systems were a hodgepodge of scientists, engineers, hackers, and so forth. How long would industry have waited for a certification in Embedded Systems?
I think the multi-day-long technical screens are a separate issue. Tech companies have gotten themselves utterly freaked out about the terror of hiring the wrong person. Other industries don't have the same problem because they don't follow the same trends, and it could change overnight if tech companies get sick of it.
Both the SOA and the CAS recently changed their exam process to include things like various predictive modeling and clustering techniques. The SOA decided to extend the number of exams and the CAS decided to make it a separate certification.
There are too many points in the book to summarize in a comment, but anyone who wants to read some - at least to some point - serious historical work on the topic should probably have a look at the book.
1) Provide legal muscle to individual engineers - If there's a legal dispute between a company and engineer, the company can just outspend on lawyers. It doesn't matter if the law says the engineer is right, the engineer can't fight a long legal battle. This will help with issues such as non-competes, off-hours IP ownership, startup stock/options disputes, etc. It also provides a place for engineers to report issues such as H1B visa abuse.
2) Politcal lobbying - The voice of engineers is not heard in the H1B debate. This association could lobby and make sure the interests of engineers are represented in the debate.
3) Accreditation - No more stupid technical interviews.
I want to emphasize, this is NOT a union. It does not do strikes, set salary, or any of the things associated with unions. The primary power of an association like this is pooling resources for litigation power and political lobbying that serves the interests of engineers, not companies.
You'll get a mixed bag. On one hand, it limits major acts of gross negligence where a practitioner really didn't know a thing about what they were doing. In trade, you get a hierarchical, rigid career path where the people at the top -- the professionals/partners -- extract economic rent from those below in trade for their exclusive ability to practice the trade as independent professionals, not under control of anyone else.
Be careful what you wish for. Professionalization would probably benefit the old at the expense of the young, because salaries wouldn't necessarily track performance (or perception thereof) as directly as they do now, in tech. As controversial as it might seem, I really think there is a limit of how much value one can add as an individual practitioner software developer, and don't think people should necessarily get, or expect, raises for doing the same job year in and year out, just for showing up. So you can either plateau salary quickly, which is what we have now, or hit the same peak, but take a lot longer to get there. It's a complex issue either way but I don't think the status quo is actually that bad.
[1] After economist Charlie Munger, invoked when people mention "the free market" or "regulation" to the solution to any problem. Think about the business leaders/regulators we have, not necessarily ideal ones of our imaginations.
Practically every single piece of advice ever given about engineering and scientific practices on HN, or its cousin sites/forums, is that it's a pointless pre-mature optimization and should be avoided at all costs in favor of just hacking out and coughing up a piece of demoware that is loosely based on your slideware, both of which you're trying to sell to an audience that fundamentally doesn't care if it works or what its technical or scientific merits or risks are, and in that world I'm not sure where there's room for a vibrant and growing set of professional bodies because in that world the need for credibility benchmarks and verifiable rigor are almost entirely irrelevant.
The only logical explanation I can this for this is because HR has to find something for itself to do.
Is there any evidence to suggest that requiring mutli-day technical screens reduces the rate of bad hires?
" Before ending, I offer the following example of how certification/de-certification will work: I hereby de-certify Prins Ralston, Nancy Mead, Patricia Douglas and Ed Yourdon. They will forever after have to write their names with the letters RTSF (Relegated To Slinging Fries) after them. This demonstration shows us two things about the process: 1) those who do the certification are always effectively self-appointed, and 2) the basis for de-certification, no matter what the societal rationale, always works out to be the private agenda of the de-certifier. James Bach and Luke Hohmann came out against certification in their article, arguing along the same lines I have used above. But I am going to de-certify them as well. This shows a third fundamental fact about certification: 3) it is inherently capricious, subject to all kinds of mischief. I vote that we let poor old Citicorp and poor old Aetna and poor old Microsoft figure out for themselves who they should hire. I suggest that we have a perfectly fine selection mechanism at work today; it's called the market. Some people get hired as software developers and some people don't. It is a lot more competent than any appointed elite would be and a lot more ethical."
[0] 'Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams', Tom Demarco, Timothy Lister
[1] http://www.systemsguild.com/certification.htm