The difference is that all chefs can make people sick with poor food safety, yet the vast majority of programmers are working on things where security really doesn't matter.

If we had mandatory security certifications, Reddit wouldn't exist. Nor, for that matter, would Windows. And while many of us would probably rejoice at that, I think a lot of people would be pretty pissed off if they had to use OpenBSD.

BTW, I interned at a company that does avionics/medical devices/financial software. Those industries do have strong regulations, like mandatory code reviews and traceability matrices. And that's great for what they do, but I'd hate to see the same standards applied to your Web 2.0 social bookmarking site.

Where in the world did I say anything about "manadatory?"

You're probably thinking of this article at Raganwald: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/07/certification-bring-it-o...

Rebuttal here: http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2007/07/04/certification-pl...

The thing is, the market only sorts out egregious programmers.

The security certification is a wonderful idea! I think that would be a great place to start. (And end, perhaps.) The test for this could be entirely empirical. An applicant could be required to place $1000 in escrow, and implement a web application on the guild's servers. They would be required to add certain features. During the test, anyone would be welcome to try and hack the website. If anyone can prove that they are successful, they get the $1000. If the features all get implemented with no hacking, then the applicant gets their money back, minus the fee.

Although I did laugh, I have to ask if this was this a joke? So $1000 or $100 is what you pay (depending on if you fail or succeed)? Aside from the monetary figures you mentioned, sure it sounds like a great idea for a staffing business.

Not a joke. Do you think the amounts are too high? This thing doesn't even have to be a certification. It could be a contest.

This is silly. Programming, networking, etc certifications exist: big companies like MSFT give them out if you jump through all the hoops and prove your high skillz. Fortunately for us crappy programmers on the web, companies that give a shit about those certifications care about hiring people with them, and companies that don't, don't. Yay for free markets!

More words in my mouth. In many cases, the market settles for something that just shows the hiring manager dotted their I's. (A hoop-jumping exercise that feeds another hoop-jumping exercise.) If there were certifications based on actual results in practice, this would be beneficial on many levels. It would be a way to disseminate good practices, and it would be a more direct indicator of the ability to produce results.

In other words: the market does do something, but someone could do even better.