I agree with your complaint about tools being designed to constrict and patronise us (my old manager used to always make reference to "hardware obstruction layers"). Perhaps software development as a whole is in an Eternal September, even, but don't think that using qualifications as gatekeeping tools will solve this.
I come from a "real" engineering background (EEE), as does my old man (Chem Eng) and things are no different there: the companies that care more about whether or not you're 6 Sigma certified than what actual, real experience you have at the coalface tend to repel highly competent problem solvers and attract the Process Eng equivalent of the "Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer".
The SWE "hacker" ideal where your code speaks for itself and they don't care what idiotic courses you've completed is one of the things that attracted me to the role.
But the code doesn't speak for itself. It's not meritocratic.
It's amenable to the same social ingratiations as all other institutions.
In the same way that say, homeopathy presents itself as medicine where it is just expensive capsules of pure sugar, the reliance on the extraordinary popular delusions and madness of the crowds has been a well documented problem since mackey wrote a book in that name in 1841.
That's why when barriers were real, in days of inferior computing, only competency could pull through while now it's been supplanted by conformance and orthodoxy.
To what? It's merely perfunctory. The levers to reality have been detached. We have become the homeopaths diluting belladonna in a hope that poison will become medicine. But all we get in the end is merely a sugar high.
I come from a "real" engineering background (EEE), as does my old man (Chem Eng) and things are no different there: the companies that care more about whether or not you're 6 Sigma certified than what actual, real experience you have at the coalface tend to repel highly competent problem solvers and attract the Process Eng equivalent of the "Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer".
The SWE "hacker" ideal where your code speaks for itself and they don't care what idiotic courses you've completed is one of the things that attracted me to the role.