[Discuss] Another reason government licensing of software engineers is a bad, bad, bad idea (Was: Programming vs Engineering)

[David Rosenstrauch]

On 01/22/2012 06:31 PM, MBR wrote:
> Whenever government, be it Federal, state, or local, is given the power
> to decide who is allowed to do a particular thing, that power is
> inevitably abused to satisfy the demands of some powerful lobbying
> group.

> But let's get back to professional licenses. The argument for why
> government should be able to control who can and who cannot practice a
> particular profession is that they're supposedly protecting the public
> from incompetents. If a doctor, a lawyer, an electrician, or an
> architect screws up, people may well die! Of course, in practice,
> licensing boards more often than not protect their own and incompetent
> practitioners generally keep their licenses as long as they don't piss
> off anyone on the licensing board. So the licensing system doesn't even
> accomplish what it claims to.

For the record, in nearly all professions requiring 
licensing/certification, it is not the government that decides who can 
practice.  One of the hallmarks of a discipline being a "profession" is 
that it is self-regulating; i.e., a governing board or committee for the 
profession - made up completely of members of the profession - decide on 
what the appropriate standards of the profession are.  (And as a result 
who is / is not deemed appropriate to practice it.)  Nearly all 
professions work this way - medicine, law, accounting, etc.

Government intervention, if it gets involved at all, is generally only 
limited to things like enforcing that people can't practice the 
profession without a board-granted license.


That said, I'm only correcting what I see as a factual error, and am not 
staking out a position in the larger debate.  (Wisely, I think.)  :-)

DR