But a lot of what you describe is what most people here would describe as basic competence. We're not talking about something like continuously deploying to multiple regions with architectures that permit high scalability, availability, yadda yadda. We're taking about the ability to create a simple back-end that won't lose customer data (because it has tested backups), obeyed 80/20 rules on cybersecurity, and are reasonably maintainable (code isn't suffocating under centuries of tech debt).
Every other engineering discipline has licensing requirements. People think software is special because the industry moves quickly, and indeed I agree that creating a formal, standard licensure body is extremely difficult, bordering on impossible, but think of it this way:
If, hypothetically, there was a proper licensure - how many people would be competent enough to earn it? We may think that there's a labor shortage now, but really, it pales in comparison to how bad things could be if all of a sudden everyone had to get licensed.
That's the real problem - most "software engineers" are not at a level of competence where they could get licensed, if such a license existed. And the industry's way of dealing with a lack of licensure is to throw more people and money at the problem, because the problem has defied all attempts to think smarter about solving it.
Every other engineering discipline has licensing requirements. People think software is special because the industry moves quickly, and indeed I agree that creating a formal, standard licensure body is extremely difficult, bordering on impossible, but think of it this way:
If, hypothetically, there was a proper licensure - how many people would be competent enough to earn it? We may think that there's a labor shortage now, but really, it pales in comparison to how bad things could be if all of a sudden everyone had to get licensed.
That's the real problem - most "software engineers" are not at a level of competence where they could get licensed, if such a license existed. And the industry's way of dealing with a lack of licensure is to throw more people and money at the problem, because the problem has defied all attempts to think smarter about solving it.