Having a Medical Degree (Doctorate in Medicine), doesnt mean you are credentialed to be a practicing doctor either. Doctors btw dont get asked to "go diagnose this patient real quick" during their interviews.
Credentialism in tech is an interesting rabbit hole. We basically do have nurses vs doctors with degrees of speciality, but some places pay them all the same. Some places do pay the backend engineer differently from the front end guys.
Its well known that bare metal C engineers are not making as much as React devs in alot of cities, and most people seem to broadly agree the C engineer has a harder task than the React one.
So we would need to figure out whats the CNA/LPN/NP, doctor, general doctor, brain surgeon, and veterinarian of our fields. But it's not quite so simple right? We might think front end where you are grinding out simple React or PHP apps is easy, but if you are a front end dev on a billion plus dollar selling system or with very high stakes stuff going on you probably do want a "doctor level" dev right? You probably dont need the AI dev though (the brain surgeon) if we continue the analogy.
They might not be asked to do this because their board has already done it for them: https://www.abim.org/Media/h5whkrfe/internal-medicine.pdf
A US-centric view. My (Swiss) engineering degree certifies me as a software engineer ("ing. info. dipl. EPF", whose use is legally restricted to actual graduates).
At least in California, you don't have to go to law school to take this exam, and if you pass it you are just as qualified to practice law as someone who did go to law school. I doubt that happens very often but at least it's possible.
OTOH a Software Bar Exam would probably be much worse than the leetcode grind because it would inevitably become something you can only realistically pass right after finishing a very good CS degree, or equivalent study, in your 30's at the very latest. And it would become a de facto requirement for the better jobs, making the privilege bias even worse.
https://www.calbar.ca.gov/Admissions/Examinations/California...
So we could call that a degree? And have institutions that specialise in testing for it? And because some of those institutions will be better at measuring this, we could rank them?
I thought most people complaining about the current approach didn't like this one either.