Professional licensing - Was: Is there anything we can do as a group about SCO ?

[Daniel Wolstenholme]

>Message: 7
>From: Vaughn Treude <vltreude@deru.com>
>Organization: Nakota Software, Inc.
>Subject: Professional licensing - Was: Is there anything we can
do as a group about SCO ?
>Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 07:58:44 -0400
>
>I'm in the IEEE and several (but by no means all) of the
>members of our group have PE certification.  I'm not against
>it if it's a voluntary thing, something you do to get a "PE"
>after your name.  Here in Arizona it's pretty much that way,
>but in other states - noticeably California - it's pretty
>difficult to practice at all without it.

What are you talking about?  It's difficult to be an engineer in
CA without a PE?  I don't buy that for a second.  There's no way
all the engineers working at Intel, AMD, Sun Microsystems, SGI,
Qualcomm, and the countless other tech companies in California
(esp. Silicon Valley) have PE certification.

>Medical, avionics, and other life-critical applications are a
>sticky wicket, but I'd say the important thing there is
>certifying the process, not the designers.  Even the best
>developers can produce crap if there's no good process in
>place.  And no, I don't think the government should regulate
>even that directly.  Free market organizations like
>Underwriters Laboratories do a better job.   

Yep, this is why licensing is stupid.  If you're designing a
microprocessor, an immense project requiring thousands of
engineers and years of time, what the hell good is having people
licensed?  The only way to produce a quality design is to have a
good organization, good management, and a good process.  With so
much money on the line, no one individual should be capable of
producing a significant error.  The process of design and
validation must be set up to eliminate defects.  No
state-approved testing of engineers' competence is going to help
this, nor should it--it's the company's job to make sure they're
hiring qualified people, not just people who are good at
test-taking.  The state has no business getting involved in
companies' hiring decisions.  And even more importantly, no
individual engineer should have any liability for a project
involving billions of dollars and tens of thousands of
employees.

>And finally - if it's not about control, why have governments
>taken the liberty of denying and suspending professional
>licenses for a whole host of non-professional-related reasons?

This is another good reason licensing is crap.  The state has no
business being involved with individuals' employment, other than
garnishing wages when someone has a court judgment against them.

>The guy had gone to school to be a paralegal, and the state
>had denied him a license to practiced because of his "white
>supremacist" views.  Being denied the opportunity of working
>"within the system"  may have been part of what made the guy
>snap.

Yep, as I said before, it's a company's job to make sure they're
hiring the right people, not the state.  This is not supposed to
be an economic system wherein the means of production is
controlled by the state.  There was a large country years ago
that tried this approach, and we all know what happened to it.


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