And the bar exams are just another "has a college degree" filter too, but they've been proven to work as a useful metric, and they are overseen by an association of professionals. And legal knowledge is way more open-ended than software knowledge, with far more subtleties in its practice. Yet. The bar exam somehow works.
>Why can't we have some sort licensing board like a medical board so that you prove you can code
Too many software developers have a strong aversion to regulatory bodies in their own profession. That really is the issue here.
There's another recent topic here from someone else, on asking how to get a job while you have a job. And some of the replies suggest he has similar problems I do which comes around to my struggles in my career.
I almost always apply to jobs cold. Go online, through the filter of unwashed masses. Then eventually I learned that referrals get you on the short list to interviews.
Someone who mocked interviewed me told me what was wrong with my approach. Generally speaking I meander too much when I talk. I hope to have another mock session with him again. We actually scheduled four of them, one week after another, but he only had time to do the first one. The rest of the schedule was postponed indefinitely because too busy to do them (because of work). No wonder finding interview help from professionals is hard, even in person.
Well then I must be doing it wrong because all I want to do after work is relax and not talk to anyone and sometimes play video games. I still want to be recognized for the work that I do but apparently that's not enough.
Maybe I have Asperger's or something else, but this whole thing about relying on connections to get jobs more easily doesn't come naturally to me.
I am actually guilty of this- I'm trying to overcome my fear of being more friendly at work. I'm seen as the serious guy who doesn't talk to anyone (outside of work-related matters). The result of me not being more social for 10 years since college means that I don't really get contacted by colleagues, and I always have to go in cold with a new job. I don't have any "voucher" people.
TBH the whole thing about getting ahead more easily to jobs through common friends, man does it remind me of nightclubs. I don't care about having a personal entourage, but the industry seems to be forcing me to. I'm just trying to live a happy career and life without needing to be popular and stuff.
And while I do have friends I've made in high school, they're a small group and they've never given me good leads. I don't generally see them as people I rely on for jobs. They're in totally different work fields and the kind of people who can't tell programmers apart from IT.
Why wasn't building a good network second nature with me, I don't know. But want to know why I don't have the intuition, and how to fix that.
>Why can't we have some sort licensing board like a medical board so that you prove you can code
Too many software developers have a strong aversion to regulatory bodies in their own profession. That really is the issue here.