Programming

This. I've had someone in my team that was completely self-taught with no relevant education that was a great dev.

I've also interviewed someone that supposedly had a master degree and a couple of certificates and couldn't remember how to create a loop during the interview.

I don't know how you could properly implement "standardization of qualification and competencies" without just min-maxing it in a way that favors academics

Programming should be more like other trades, apprentice for a year or two before getting journeymen status, then work up to master status. Pay and job changing becomes more fair, and we get some reasonable fucking hours and rules to keep us from making overworked mistakes.

Companies know what they’re getting asked on the programmer’s level (specific experience will still matter, but baseline will be much more standard).

And workers get experience and learn from the gray beards instead of chatgpting their way into a job they don’t understand.

As a counter balance to that though, interviewers need to understand what they are hiring for and tailor the questions asked to those requirements.

For example, there is genuinely very little coding required of an SRE these days but EVERY job interview wants you to do some leetcode style algorithm design.. Since containers took over, the times I have used anything beyond relatively unremarkable bash scripts is exceptionally small. It's extremely unlikely that I will be responsible for a task that is so dependent on performance that I need to design a perfect O(1) algorithm. On terraform though, I'm a fucking surgeon.

SRE specifically should HEAVILY focus on system design and almost all other things should have much much less priority.. I've failed plenty of skill assessments just because of the code though.

Evaluation is fine but I'd like to eliminate the overuse of leetcode style questions. I've used those skills in exactly two places: school and tech interviews. If the tech job is actually for a scientific/biotech company then it's fair game.

Also, schools don't really prepare students for writing production code (if it's a compsci degree). I learned about unit testing, mocking, dependency injection, environment configs, REST APIs, and UI/UX on the job.

And yet that could rule people like me out. I have a history of delivering longer than most developers have been alive, across many technologies, languages, toolsets, for several industries. My resume looks fantastic, and I can pull together a larger strategy and project plan in my sleep, and deliver a cost effective and quality solution.

However after jumping across all these technologies, I really rely on my IDE for the syntax. I’ll use a plugin for the cli syntax of whatever tool, framework or cloud service we’re using today.

I like to think I’m extremely qualified, but that programming test on paper will get me every time (why the eff is anything on paper these days), and certifications were a thing for early in your career

I think it's important to check for competencies that are valuable to the employer during the interview process. However many, but admittingly not all, employers will use time constrained college level puzzels that a candidate can usually only solve if they have seen it before.

I've been on both sides of the interview process. In my day to day I use a debugger to verify and step through code all the time. Hacker rank, the leading platform to test candidates and generate a metric report, doesn't even have a debugger. Off-by-one index mistakes are sooo common to see from a candidate who is under time pressure. A few iterations with a debugger and problem solved. I advocate for candidates to develop on their on env and share their screen or bring it with them. But anyway, I'm ranting.

I agree with most comments arguing against a standardization and pointing to the weakness. I didn't say it works great, I just wish it was like some other professionals have. See my comment about other engineering disciplines that have a successful licensure process.

I agree with what you said, it is a shit show. but I wish it weren't so.

My good friend is a civil engineer and for him to obtain a Professional Engineer license (PE) he had to complete a four-year college degree, work under a PE licensed engineer for at least four years, pass two intensive competency exams and earn a license from their state's licensure board. Then, to retain their licenses, PEs must continually maintain and improve their skills throughout their careers.

This licencing approach is prohibitive to just "pay your way" through. This never caught on in software and computer eng because of how quickly it was (and still is) changing. But certain pillars are becoming better defined such as CI/CD, production-safe code & practices, DevOps.