The modern medical field is not thousands of years old. It actually emulates the air traffic control system when it comes to its internal regulations and division of labor. This is how they keep out quacks who still believe in bloodletting.

We could do a lot better if we got over our hubris and tried to learn from how other more mature feilds run themselves.

With self-driving cars on the horizon, and with our entire communications infrastructure defined by software, the potential for catastrophe in our industry is greater than the medical industry.

It’s not like nobody’s tried before. The term ’software engineering’ precisely stems from the idea that software development should be more like other engineering disciplines.

That those attempts didn’t work out probably has less to do with developer hubris but with software engineering indeed being different from other engineering disciplines.

After all, we don’t think of medicine in terms of ‘medical engineering’ or ‘human bio-system maintenance’ either, simply because it’s something else.

Besides, certificates are rampant in the IT industry. Most of those however tend to say very little about the actual skills of the ones certified.