🚀 go-pugleaf

jbw@maverick.uswest.com (Joe Wells) writes:

>Licensing is an anti-capitalistic method to reduce competition and raise
>prices, and that's it.  It has little effect on competency, since the kind
>of things that can be tested have little to do with how safely the
>licensed person works after getting the license.

Actually, there is a way in which licensing does have an effect.  In
medicine (veterinary medicine at least), to keep your license, you are
required to get a certain amount of continuing education per year.
That's important in a fast-changing field (which both medicine and
software are).  Certainly this requirement can be abused (sometimes
continuing education credits are given for little more than class
reunions), but veterinarians don't stagnate as fast as programmers.

Such a requirement would also have a salutary effect on the education
providers.  Though a programmer by trade, I've looked at the
conference proceedings for vet conferences.  Tracks of real use to the
practitioners are not a jaw-dropping surprise, like they are in CS
conferences.  

Course, there are better ways of achieving matter-of-course CS
continuing education than licensing.

Brian Marick
Motorola @ University of Illinois
marick@cs.uiuc.edu, uiucdcs!marick