>Nearly every other industry is credentialed

In general, the undergrad degree is a filter. Unless someone for, say, a marketing role has a lot of experience, a BS/BA is probably a requirement and a better known school probably gives you a bit of a leg up as may a graduate degree.

You're still going to have some interviews. In my experience, HR passes promising resumes through, there are 5 or so half hour interviews, and then there's a thumbs up/down by the people who did the interviews.

But for most roles there's no specific non-negotiable credential like there is for an accountant or lawyer.

In other white collar professional jobs (not admin), esp. STEM fields, he's not wrong.

He is wrong, actually. STEM fields are the exception. Most white-collar jobs require an undergrad degree, but the industry itself doesn't require a particular job-related credential, and the degree itself isn't enough to get a job.

Uh... Law? Medicine? Accounting? Eng.? Teaching? What other job where you actually need hard technical skills equivalent to software dev is there no widely used non-commercial credentialing system?

Outside of a relatively small percentage of professional engineer certifications, there is generally no credentialing system in engineering or the sciences outside of academic degrees--the requirements for which may be more or less rigid in a given case. While some business roles may require an MBA, this is probably less true than in the past. A given position might also give preference to some industry cert.

But outside of medical, legal, and certain financial roles, you're more likely to see formal non-academic licensing for truck drivers and hairdressers than for white collar professionals.

Lawyers need to have passed the bar. Accountants need their CPA. Doctors their MD. Pharmacists their Pharm.D. Finance professionals their CFA. And so on.

Software engineers making 150K with only a four year degree and some leetcode have nothing to complain about. Take homes? Whiteboards? Cry me a river. Try to pass the bar or get through residency instead.

And so on is doing a lot of work there. Most professional jobs, whether technical or more on the business side, have very little in the way of credentialing requirements beyond mostly having a strong preference for an undergrad degree. If anything, my impression is that a degree like an MBA is considered less essential for many jobs than it used to be.

Those jobs are a minority of white collar office jobs.

You pass the bar 1 time. Not every couple years.

> You pass the bar 1 time. Not every couple years.

You maintain a current law license, which requires having passed the bar once, continuing education requirements, and the absence of professional mal-, mis-, or non-feasance sufficient to lose that license. Taken together, the requirements are ongoing, though some individual elements are one-time.

In my state lawyers need 15 hours per year. If they are anything like my wife’s medical continuing education credits they are super easy to get because many of the things she already has to do for work count.

Not getting disbarred hardly counts as an ongoing requirement in all but the most meaningless sense of the word.

you do that while you are on the job, and generally i expect that the time and cost for that is covered by the current employer.

Sure, sorry in Portuguese, but there is always the option to use Google Translate,

https://www.ordemengenheiros.pt/pt/a-ordem/colegios-e-especi...

Problem is people calling themselves engineers without being one.

> Try to pass the bar or get through residency instead.

It would be wonderful to have an equivalente for computer science. You do it right after graduating, study for it once and you're done. Not leetcoding for 6 months every other year for life which is ridiculous waste of time.