Another reason government licensing of software engineers is a bad, bad, bad idea (Was: Programming vs Engineering) - bostonlinuxandunix

The old Google Groups will be going away soon, but your browser is incompatible with the new version.
Message from discussion Another reason government licensing of software engineers is a bad, bad, bad idea (Was: Programming vs Engineering)
View parsed - Show only message text
Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of discuss-bounces+bostonlinuxandunix+garchive-35908=googlegroups....@blu.org designates 216.235.254.231 as permitted sender) client-ip=216.235.254.231;
DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=darose.net; h=message-id:date
	:from:mime-version:to:subject:references:in-reply-to
	:content-type:content-transfer-encoding; q=dns; s=darose.net; b=
	DL7w5OoUAvP31NmPM/DkXf44+QHJ5qVfmfMNzUXLXrr8hVFQaha/6T8JhSs/ZOMw
	y3a5XZdfhnA3MH9fcHylxs9AWr7XAxQOW4zreTTUFNZyn82y3Kq1hBXHZQFTCgUA
	mpz5bOzI/J3yD64clrvmbW/+70lkzK2y9Abcwf0RY/8=
Message-ID: <4F1DEE63.3070...@darose.net>
Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:33:55 -0500
From: David Rosenstrauch <dar...@darose.net>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64;
	rv:9.0) Gecko/20111224 Thunderbird/9.0.1
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: disc...@blu.org
References: <m3ehuru0nu....@dsl092-065-009.bos1.dsl.speakeasy.net>
	<3AB0C463-B9AD-4A7A-9EE4-E9A744342...@gmail.com>
	<CADdM39y4qU=ET5HHcCgUAkJU6H8_wDAePqPyuiMKX=zk=_3...@mail.gmail.com>
	<4F1C9C6D.1010...@arlsoft.com>
In-Reply-To: <4F1C9C6D.1010...@arlsoft.com>
Subject: Re: [Discuss] Another reason government licensing of software
 engineers is a bad, bad, bad idea (Was:  Programming vs Engineering)
Precedence: list
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; Format="flowed"
Sender: discuss-bounces+bostonlinuxandunix+garchive-35908=googlegroups....@blu.org
Errors-To: discuss-bounces+bostonlinuxandunix+garchive-35908=googlegroups....@blu.org

On 01/22/2012 06:31 PM, MBR wrote:
> Whenever government, be it Federal, state, or local, is given the power
> to decide who is allowed to do a particular thing, that power is
> inevitably abused to satisfy the demands of some powerful lobbying
> group.

> But let's get back to professional licenses. The argument for why
> government should be able to control who can and who cannot practice a
> particular profession is that they're supposedly protecting the public
> from incompetents. If a doctor, a lawyer, an electrician, or an
> architect screws up, people may well die! Of course, in practice,
> licensing boards more often than not protect their own and incompetent
> practitioners generally keep their licenses as long as they don't piss
> off anyone on the licensing board. So the licensing system doesn't even
> accomplish what it claims to.

For the record, in nearly all professions requiring 
licensing/certification, it is not the government that decides who can 
practice.  One of the hallmarks of a discipline being a "profession" is 
that it is self-regulating; i.e., a governing board or committee for the 
profession - made up completely of members of the profession - decide on 
what the appropriate standards of the profession are.  (And as a result 
who is / is not deemed appropriate to practice it.)  Nearly all 
professions work this way - medicine, law, accounting, etc.

Government intervention, if it gets involved at all, is generally only 
limited to things like enforcing that people can't practice the 
profession without a board-granted license.


That said, I'm only correcting what I see as a factual error, and am not 
staking out a position in the larger debate.  (Wisely, I think.)  :-)

DR
_______________________________________________
Discuss mailing list
Disc...@blu.org
http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Create a group - Google Groups - Google Home - Terms of Service - Privacy Policy
Account Options
