I don't know, currently they don't make pencils and paper illegal to own unless you have an engineering or architecture degree. And you can even legally use those tools to draw buildings and work out math formulas. You just can't represent the final work as an engineer in specific contexts.

The software equivalent would be that you can't sign off on code for a safety critical system without proper credentials. Now that doesn't mean you can't write such code, just like the guy swinging the hammer and striking a nail doesn't need to be an engineer.

I think that would be one of the major issues.

Here's how that situation is handled on the legal side in the US. Anyone is permitted to practice law for themselves, but to practice law on someone's behalf, you need to be admitted to the bar.

I'm not endorsing it, but I can imagine a situation where anyone can write code on their own, but to get paid to do it, you need a license (subject to ethics rules). Again, I'm not supporting the idea, but it could work that way.

>Here's how that situation is handled on the legal side in the US. Anyone is permitted to practice law for themselves, but to practice law on someone's behalf, you need to be admitted to the bar.

Important caveat: companies must be represented by a licensed attorney. A non-attorney startup founder cannot represent his/her own company in court. This is technically legally compliant with "someone else" since the corporation is a distinct legal entity, but it means that if you can't afford a lawyer (and which of us working slobs can these days?) and someone sues your company you are SOL.

Courts are seeing a massive rise in pro se litigants over the last 15 years, entirely because legal services are stretching to costs that put them outside the reach of non-millionaires.

Law is a great example of the nightmare that software can become if we go overboard on regulation. There was once a time where becoming a self-taught lawyer was not all that different than becoming a self-taught programmer. You could learn just by "reading the law" and shadowing professionals, much like you can learn just by reading (and writing) code today. It was at least partially merit based and some of the best legal minds of the last generation came up this way.

Now, you have to sacrifice 6 years of your life and easily half a million dollars to be allowed to even try to sell legal services, and the market is so flooded with low-end graduates who are stuck in this desperate situation that many of them can't even sell their services anyway, due to the extreme competition in the lower rungs (driven by student desperation to find work to pay down that massive debt and the artificially constrained supply by the ABA's excessive licensing requirements).

This is the worst possible idea ever. Get government out of our lives!

More likely a license, granted by some developer's guild (or worse, a government body) that allows you legal access to SWE tools and the ability to be a paid developer. Lose your license and the few proprietary tools around can reject your code signature or the guild can sue you. This sounds like fiction when RMS proposed this dystopia in the 90s but consider a future where complexity is so large only a handful of tools exist that can manipulate said complexity, or medical programming where access to 'bio IDEs' is licensed like dentists/nurses are because of insurance requirements.

That sounds horrific.

no, you just wouldn't be able to practice professionally until licensed, the same way medicine, law and "real" engineering work.

Lots of engineers work professionally without a PE.

http://news.thomasnet.com/imt/2013/07/15/is-a-professional-e...

Most engineers work professionally without a PE. I think it's something like 80% of engineers never get a PE.

This idea that all other engineers have a PE is rampant in the software field, but it's just not true.

Most engineers don't offer services to the public. Every public building, bridge and road you've ever used were all overseen and signed off by a PE. Same with the infrastructure for your local utility companies.

Most software engineers don't provide services directly to the public either, but licensure would a necessary first step to regulating the field.

Having PEs sign off and oversee projects is not the same as all "real" engineers being licensed. If you believe that "real" engineering is the model for software engineering, then only a small fraction of software engineers would have a PE.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. At the very least, I think it's reasonable to require that certain software engineering projects have some professional oversight, but that doesn't mean that the intern needs to be licensed, just that the important architectural bits of a project are approved by a competent professional.

That's a stupid attempt at solving this though. It would drive every capable but un-licensed programmer right in the arms of organized crime who would be more than happy to employ them.

Just like all the unlicensed doctors?

I don't think it's a good idea to require licensing for most software engineers, but I think this specific concern is not actually a significant issue.

I think it could be a significant issue.

1) Quite simply, software is much easier to learn than medicine, so you have a larger supply of capable software engineers than doctors. If the market for their services is being artificially suppressed, they will gravitate to wherever their services can make money.

2) There is a black market for medical services. Ever heard of a back-alley abortion?

> Quite simply, software is much easier to learn than medicine, so you have a larger supply of capable software engineers than doctors. If the market for their services is being artificially suppressed, they will gravitate to wherever their services can make money.

The black market for exploits is already very lucrative. Devs willing to take that money are probably doing so already.

> There is a black market for medical services. Ever heard of a back-alley abortion?

Back alley abortions exist mostly because of restrictions on legal abortions, not because doctors aren't allowed to practice without license.

So if a teenager who is getting into programming has an aunt who is selling quilts on the side, he can't help her set up a custom website?

Or he can, as long as he only writes static HTML and not a line of javascript, or he can do that as long as she doesn't pay him even a nickel or a free quilt?

He can't represent her in court or officially do her taxes, why should he be allowed to officially render other professional services to her?

Because the alternative is rent collecting. What you're proposing would make it illegal to upload HTML you can wrote yourself to a domain you own and collect money for it. It's one thing to require credentials for specific specializations within the industry that have critical safety impact (like aviation); it's another thing entirely to require my nephew to be licensed before he can upload code to the internet.

It's mind boggling to me that you'd even make this argument...taxes aren't even a good example. I can officially do my own taxes and I'm not an accountant. So would the aunt have to "unofficially" have her nephew write the code, then pretend to have written it herself and everything is fine? That's currently legal with taxes - I help my own family with them.

Furthermore, ask me how often I'm seen a company get hacked that had ISO 27001 certification from a security firm with more letters after their names than employees.

Define "professional services." Forget programming, can she pay him to help her build a shed in her backyard?

It makes sense to require some sort of accreditation for systems that must be failsafe against significant financial, legal, or physical harm. But it doesn't make sense to require it for the digital equivalent of a backyard shed.

And even safety-critical systems don't require the force of law.

I develop embedded software for safety-critical systems. There is no force of law governing that in the US, but there are industry-recognized service providers that will evaluate your design and provide a certificate affirming that it adheres to specific standards such as ISO13849 and IEC61508. No-one in this industry will buy an uncertified product, despite no law telling them they have to. There is no need to create a law that will have massive unintended consequences.

I'd see it more like the Writer's Guild, Director's Guild, or Screen Actor's Guild. They don't stop you from entering the field, or from doing smaller work, but once you start doing professional work, you would need to join the guild. (I don't know where that line would be drawn, and right now, it's not important to me.) The existence of such guilds does not mean that non-members can't buy paper, director's chairs, or cameras.

That reminds me of the HTML Writer's Guild, which used to be a thing in the 90's: http://hwg.org