Have you considered instituting a formal quality system? I'm not even saying that it's an alternative to or incompatible with licensing, but there are off-the-shelf standards for software process and quality you can download and implement today without government action.
A surgeon doesn't get to time-travel and test 1000 different ways to make a cut. You don't get to build 1000 bridges in the same location for load testing. But with software we can have a final deliverable that remains inert if you put quality gates between the development process and deployment. There is a very strong argument that when it is possible to have process and testing to hold the deliverable itself to the standards, that puts more confidence in the deliverable than just practitioner sign-off that it's right.
Why should I as an individual software engineer not support this? We’re already in this profession and pulling the ladder up could help us maintain our salaries and working conditions
Like with "practicing medicine without a license" or "practicing law without a license" ... what would constitute "practicing software development without a license?"
The licenses are enforced by law... and just having a certificate isn't sufficient for them to be useful. You also have to say "you can't do this without a license."
> The Software Engineering PE exam, which has struggled to reach an audience, will be discontinued by the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying after the April 2019 administration. The exam has been administered five times, with a total of 81 candidates.
> NCEES’s Committee on Examination Policy and Procedures reviews the history of any exam with fewer than 50 total first-time examinees in two consecutive administrations and makes recommendations to the NCEES Board of Directors about the feasibility of continuing the exam.
Part of it was "most software developers don't have enough experience in other engineering disciplines to be able to pass the FE exam"
> This collaboration was preceded by Texas becoming the first state to license software engineers in 1998. The Texas Board of Professional Engineers ended the experience-only path to software engineering licensure in 2006; before the 2013 introduction of the software engineering PE exam, licensure candidates had to take an exam in another discipline.
> NCEES Director of Exam Services Tim Miller, P.E., says there was a lot of discussion about the exam’s impact, including how many people with software engineering degrees were taking the FE exam. “If they’re not even taking the FE exam, they’re probably not going to take the PE exam,” he says. “In addition, if the boards aren’t regulating the [software engineering profession], it’s tough to get people to take the exam.”
