Anybody who's done hiring will attest that "formal barriers to entry" (i.e. accreditation via certifications and degrees) say very little about a programmer's ability to produce valuable output. Hiring would not be "the big problem" in tech if one could simply outsource the hiring decision to such a formal barrier to entry. But, since formal barriers to entry are demonstrably useless signals specifically for hiring programmers, we resort to all sorts of other superstitions which, when put together, at least bestow a visceral sense of being able to divine a person's ability to produce valuable output. People and companies all seem to have their own preferred superstitions, almost none of which include your "formal barriers to entry".
> But, since formal barriers to entry are demonstrably useless
Could you provide an example of such a barrier? Bar exams and medical review are extremely valuable to other industries. They demonstrate both competence and ethics.
Since software is utterly lacking anything resembling a formal qualification barrier it’s hard to say a thing isn’t valuable. It doesn’t make sense to disqualify something that was never there in the first place.
Industry ethical standards are also hard to disqualify because they similarly don’t exist. To someone who has never met such a burden for any professional industry it’s an easy thing to deem as worthless. In other industries compliance to ethical standards are more important than perceptions of competence.
I did mention more than one example in the first sentence of my reply: CS degrees and certifications.
> Since software is utterly lacking anything resembling a formal qualification barrier it's hard to say a thing isn't valuable.
This is circular logic by either of our propositions. For if my statement were true (that "formal barriers to entry [in the context of software, as explicitly mentioned multiple times in the thread] are demonstrably useless") then it is not valuable as a barrier to entry [in the context of software, as explicitly mentioned multiple times in the thread]. However since you also assert that "software is utterly lacking anything resembling a formal qualification barrier" and this necessarily includes CS degree and/or certifications then that "thing" is equally not valuable as a barrier to entry.
What you've done is conflated your relative moral value judgment (approximately that there "should be" a formal qualification barrier to entry) with another separate relative moral value judgment (that existing barriers to entry are not useful or are so useless as to fail to exist). These are two different propositions. Also please do not attack the character of your interlocutor, for your suggestion that I have "never met such a burden for any professional industry" is wrong but also just pretty lazy.
If you believe you have a way of generating a useful hiring signal that beats doing a work sample, I'm sure any number of people around here would throw money at you to build a company around it.
