> There isn’t a legal requirement to have gone to programming school before one can practice software development. (And a good thing too!)
The vast majority of developers cannot kill you if they screw up. In the cases where that isn't true, e.g. software for medical equipment, I'd expect to find some significantly higher hurdles to get past before you can release that software.
We don't generally require developers to have certain qualifications, but their output can be measured in other standardised ways nonetheless.
> their output can be measured in other standardised ways nonetheless.
What are these standardised ways to measure developer output? I've never seen any, beyond "burndown charts" and "LOC", which I don't believe pass the sniff test.
One example of a standard software might comply with is MISRA C [1]. For that, you ignore a large chunk of the C language to something much less prone to bugs. Others might be HIPAA compliance, how you handle personal information to be compliant with GDPR or the VW diesel emissions scandal a few years ago.
Lots of professions can kill people of they screw up. LOTS. Our society has various ways to deal with this.
That’s only because of the size if the impact if things go wrong. You need a license too to build a house or drive a truck because it’s actually very easy to do it %99 of the time well but you can’t afford that %1.
Low affordance causes spilled blood, blood causes regulations.
I would argue that bus drivers have a much larger impact in terms of lives lost if things go wrong, yet they have significantly lower wages and require less training. The same goes for pilots and air traffic controllers.
You can argue that but what’s your point? The current truck driver training system works well enough AFAIK. Do you demand more training?
How is it decided how many regulations are "enough" for a given field? It seems they are on an ever-increasing ratchet mechanism, often driven by mass hysteria.
If someone wants to hire someone who can kinda program a little, because they charge less, and are likely able to accomplish the task the person has in mind, then they should be free to do that.
(Of course, if the task is one where failure causes a big problem, then one should get someone more qualified.)