alt Hacker NewsI can't say I disagree. How it is with engineers they get certified as PEs due to the responsibility they have. In my mind it be similar, you don't need everyone engineer certified, but if you over X revenue or employees side it should apply, and be required to have Y numbers of certified based on company size. Then the companies like with their lawyers, will have to figure out how to follow the regulations and push forward.
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I don't understand. Do you people just figured out how to write good software? Not long ago, 70% of projects just failed. Not were written badly, but just weren't completed at all. I don't know current number. But looking around me, it's so obvious that we don't know how to write good software. For a reasonable price anyway.
What that PE certification will check? That guy knows how to write unit tests? Well, that's not much. Who will write certification? Where's that genius, why he's hiding from the rest of us?
Maybe building is figured out. I don't know. I still see bridges failing and buildings crushed, so apparently it's not perfect. But I do know that programming is not figured out. Absolutely not. We can apply tremendous effort, pay billions and produce some simple firmware which can be uploaded to a martian rover. But that doesn't scale to the rest of industry.
I think this is good thinking. I work for a state agency that deals with construction codes and licensing of building contractors, electricians, etc. If the safety of the web is in such a critical state of vulnerability as to potentially impact what the article author terms "normal" non-tech people, maybe there should be some certification that is government-regulated like you suggest. Or maybe that'll happen after real (not potential) devastation occurs - that's how building codes came around.