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jlangemeier | 4 years ago

I'm being a bit 'tongue in cheek' with this... you mean like... ABET or NCEES, which handles the FE, EIT, and PE 'tests'?

Also, ABET already accredits Software Engineering and IT programs; and NCEES has had a Software Engineering PE in the works for the last couple years (I haven't checked recently, but iirc it was slated for release in 2022(?)).

Toy problems seem to exist in pretty much any technical discipline, but it seems most acute in the software world; and I've come to suspect that it's accessibility to making those. Code is quick and human-centric technical item, where as something like a bridge rectifier, amps, fets, and PID controllers aren't necessarily items you can just 'pull out' in an interview; you can see if someone's comfortable with CAD programs, you can see if someone has the chops to understand when a BJT is more appropriate than a MOSFET; but you can't really do that quickly as a 'whiteboarding session' so other technical fields are required to be more selective since you can't just slap out a FET configuration for a D Class amp without spec sheets, requirement gathering, probably CAD design, and other design steps; but you can sure-as-shit slap out a MVP of a SPA customer portal without any of that.

Divorcing "coding" as the act of writing code, and "coding" as the mental process of building a well designed app/system would bring the software world into better alignment with a lot of the rest of the engineering world; and would make something like a SWE PE more viable in the first place. I also don't know if you've ever sat a PE, but they're also __OPEN_BOOK__, since we know that it's a lot of knowledge to have in your head, and it's a better test if you know where to look something up and how to use the right tools (kinda like a 'take-home' exam in software interviews, but not nearly as exploitable and scummy); bring your reference material, but so much ground is covered that if you don't know your stuff, you're failing the PE no matter how many reference books you bring along.

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