I'm a PE (electrical) and I think what most people don't realize is that the licensing was largely driven by the insurance industry.
Let's say you pay some people to design a building for you. You get insurance of course. A year later, the building falls down. You call your insurance company to collect. The first thing they ask is whether you took every reasonable precaution you could to prevent that from happening. Part of that would include having a licensed structural engineer design the building. If you let Joe Shmoe off the street design your building and it falls down, the insurance company is going to say you're basically SOL, because you didn't find a person you could verify was qualified.
It's really about transferring the liability from the building owner to the engineer. If there's a mistake in the design, the engineer gets sued. Guess what happens then? The engineer has professional liability insurance to pay that! How does the professional liability insurance company decide who to insure? Well, they insure people with licenses, of course. It's an elaborate scheme to transfer money from one insurance company to another.
Is it necessary for a florist? Probably not. I can't think of a situation where you'd need to sue a florist. Interior decorator might be more problematic than people realize. First, it depends on whether it's a decorator or a designer. A designer may move walls around, affecting egress paths, and can possibly have some life safety implications, so they should be able to take responsibility for that.
That doesn't make sense. Insurance companies can make policies conditional on certifications whether or not those certs are mandatory. Likewise, they can sub-insure away some of the risks to the engineer without the mandate.
You ask for a policy on your house, they ask if a person qualified by XYZ standard approved it.
If we want to make certain protections mandatory, we can at least move the regulations up one abstraction level. Instead of "you must meet these standards", it could be something more general like, "you must have an insurance policy against these events for this much", and people go with whatever insurer is willing to take that risk. That would allow for more experimentation about which standards are good enough or too stringent, by the people who have something to lose if they're not strict enough, and provide an impetus for obsolete bits to be removed.
Houses don't typically require licensed design professionals in the US and there are quantum life safety differences between a single family dwelling and other occupancies. These differences are why a McDonald's kitchen has a HALON fire suppression system over the cooking systems, a movie theater has fire sprinklers, and an office building has fire resistant construction around the stairs.
The role of the insurance industry is mostly a result of its having a vested interest in collecting data and mitigating risks. Keep in mind that "meeting code" is a standard for the worst legally allowed construction and hiring professionals is a market driven improvement over the provisions dealing with shoddy construction one finds in the Code of Hammurabi.
> I'm a PE (electrical) and I think what most people don't realize is that the licensing was largely driven by the insurance industry.
A certification program endorsed by insurance companies seems like a great idea, as does contractor-maintained liability insurance. And in a field where contractors have little to differentiate themselves except reputation and word of mouth, many specifically advertise themselves as "licensed and bonded", and people seeking a contractor look for those specifically. (Some kind of trademarked certification seems even better, to avoid any ambiguity.) All of those seem sufficient to drive contractors to voluntarily step up and seek such certification.
None of that requires mandatory licensing, though.
If you want to pull permits, get disconnected and reconnected by the electrical providers, you're gonna need a license. Also if you get an inspection on your house because you want to sell it and they find that unlicensed work was performed and no inspection found on file from when work was performed, guess what, the city can make you rip it out and redo it by licensed individual subject to a municipal inspector.
Now can you do electrical 'work' on residential without a permit or license? yes and sometimes it might be ignored but if the inspector(s) want to not ignore it, they can make you go by the regulations of your area.
For residential work, maybe, but that is already much less regulated. For anything commercial, where you are exposed to potential lawsuits from the general public it wouldn't make sense to ever use anyone unlicensed anyway.
That's an unfair characterization. Licensure is not just about protectionism, it is also about making sure that people who need to know what they're doing actually know what they're doing. And while it's far from perfect, it's pretty effective. In the U.S. it is very rare for buildings to collapse, or faulty wiring to set buildings on fire. That is in no small measure because we enforce building codes and licensure requirements for structural and electrical engineers.
It also creates a sort of backstop of accountability. If you wire something wrong and it starts a fire, you're sued. If you don't have any money, your insurance company is sued.
And if your insurance company doesn't want to be sued so much, it makes sure you have a certification or a license or basic professional degrees of competence before insuring you.
And to make it all seem like it operates on a fair and level playing field, some independent entity has to verify that the requirements for licensing are met.
And I think we all know what that has meant, historically: multiple choice tests graded by a Scantron machine.
"Bankers" is obviously a broad term, but I'd point out that just about everyone employed in the financial industry in a role where they are giving advice or soliciting/executing transactions have very strict licensing and continuing education requirements. Just look at the list of FINRA licensing exams: http://www.finra.org/industry/qualification-exams
(Of course, even licensed persons may choose to make poor choices. That said, I've taken a few of those exams, and they are no joke.)
And the FINRA licensing exams focus almost entirely on the laws that are intended to protect consumers from bad actors. To study for those exams is to have it drilled into your head what you can and can't do. Unfortunately, much of what collapsed the US economy wasn't actually illegal, and in the case where laws were broken, the bankers were comfortable with knowingly bending the rules.
User themselves are, too: look at all these BSD-style "provided as-is, explicitly no guarantees" licenses that people take enthusiastically.
And for something aircraft-grade or medical-grade, you definitely meet with rather strict controls on a case-by-case basis (unlike the wholesale licensing).
> Well, they insure people with licenses, of course. It's an elaborate scheme to transfer money from one insurance company to another.
I think that's missing the point (at least the point in theory; the point in practice might be different). The idea is that, if you're licensed, you're sufficiently unlikely to make mistakes that an insurance company can profitably insure people like you without having to charge any individual one of you too much money. In essence, it's a way of converting the concept "People who know what they're doing are less likely to screw up" into something the market can quantify and deal with and reduce variance on.
In theory, the amount of money the building owners pay their own building insurance company is exactly equal to the chance of their building falling down times the cost of that building (plus the overhead of calculating that risk, etc.). If you want that cost to do down, the most efficient way is to convincingly lower that risk. Assuming the market is reasonably effective at transmitting information (which is a big assumption), insurance seems like a perfectly reasonable way to use the market to calculate.
The attitude of "license all the things" comes from two places.
Existing groups use licensing to shut out newcomers. They are largely anti-competitive, and anti-capitalistic.
The other is where unlicensed activities results in people dying. The outrage from such events often ends up with "license the people", so that Bad Things can't happen.
That's arguably a better approach, for mechanics, nuclear power technicians, etc. Perhaps even hairdressers, who work with toxic chemicals and need to know basic safety.
For me, the "health and safety" requirements make sense. Anything outside of that is typically anti-competitive, and likely rent-seeking.
As UK citizen it really surprises me how much things are licensed and regulated in the US. I've been following /r/diy recently, and in some states you need to be licensed to even change a light switch. I assume this is to prevent someone from doing it wrong and burning down a 10 storey apartment building, but come on? Can't you trust people to use their own judgement as to whether they can do it sensibly or not?
Today I read a story about a car getting tickets for $100k [0], one of the tickets was for being in a "hazardous and dilapidated condition", broken headlights and cracked windows. I'm currently living in Rome, Italy - the traffic wardens would have a field day here, basically every car has some sort of damage from an incident.
I don't know how I feel about this issue. Haven't decided.
But if my neighbor miswires a light switch and it starts a fire that burns my house down because they're close together, that would suck. In that situation, I would have wanted a say in whether my neighbor chose to do that themselves or hire someone who knows what they're doing.
I'm living in a house that is filled with small jobs that seemed like they were done by someone who didn't know what they were doing. Lots of scrap lumber, mis-matching parts, electrical re-wires that just didn't work, etc. I'm glad I don't need a permit to fix some of that myself, but I would've loved to stop this guy before he did these things.
Or if someone's half-assery endangered otherwise innocent lives. Note: not necessarily crying "save the children!" "Innocent" as in "couldn't influence decision to get someone who knows what they're doing".
What if your neighbour puts a large pot of oil on the stove and drops some water in the boiling oil and the whole thing catches on fire (and the house burns down and your house is near)? Or candles? Or cigarettes in bed?
I don't have numbers, but I would be fairly confident in a guess that many, many more houses burn down because of a combination of open flames and carelessness, than do because of low-level DIY electrical work.
Why not just simply require people to sit through a fire safety class and issue them a fire safely license, which would be required for purchasing candles, matches or lighters? And to have an extended "cooking with gas fire safety" class as a requirement for having utility gas in your home?
In many places this is (or used to be) part of a high school diploma. My elementary school had assemblies where firefighters would come talk to us about fire safety. My middle school had a Home Economics class where they talked about grease fires and using burners correctly.
Because we can choose to draw the line somewhere, however arbitrary it might be.
Using matches to light a stove or fireplace is so common that we've as a society decided to not place restrictions on that activity because the cost outweighs the benefit.
However, doing electrical work on your house is not quite as common and the result of your work will stay with the house and possibly affect future owners. Added to that the work is generally hidden or not obvious and future owners may not know about your substandard work.
Yeah it's a totally arbitrary line, but either we license nothing or we just pick somewhere to draw it.
> we license nothing or we just pick somewhere to draw it
My original comment was because in the UK most of this stuff isn't licensed* - even installing a gas stove doesn't need a license, which I'd argue is a lot easier to screw up than a light switch.
There are 'regulations' on how things should be done, but these are merely guidelines in most cases - you won't have any issues with the authorities when trying to sell your house or with insurers if it's not up to scratch. It would be interesting to see how accidents caused by this compare in the UK and US.
On the other hand two things we do strictly regulate are 'listed' buildings and the removal of trees in your garden.
Why? This is clearly a greater danger. Obviously, people should be required to get a license before using a stove. Everyone else will be allowed to buy precooked food ($profit$!) and put it in an approved microwave.
That's true, by about 10:1. Are you saying that we shouldn't bother licensing electricians or getting permits for electrical work because people are burning down houses in fires? It feels like you're presenting this as some kind of refutation to a point I'm not making?
EDIT: What's the emoji for "my tone is sincere, I'm misunderstanding what he's saying you downvoting heathens?" ( =
By and large in the US, you can as far as the government is concerned--especially if the scope is such that a permit doesn't need to be pulled and the work inspected. (There may be exceptions in some states, but it hasn't been the case in my experience either as a matter of law or as a practical matter.)
> But if my neighbor miswires a light switch and it starts a fire that burns my house down because they're close together, that would suck. In that situation, I would have wanted a say in whether my neighbor chose to do that themselves or hire someone who knows what they're doing.
I'm more or less in the same boat, but leaning towards "not licensing."
Here's how I look at it: in your scenario, would licensing have really prevented any of that from happening? It might give us grounds to sue for damages, but I don't think it would deter idiots from doing what idiots are going to do. Seems more likely to hinder conscious people who can be bothered to look up "the right way" to do something in the first place.
In industrial cases though I absolutely see the need for licensing where safety is concerned - I don't want an untrained person working on the aircraft that's about to transport me across 3000 miles of land mass.
The distinction I would make is a matter of scale and significance I suppose.
That's a good point about the idiots. A lot of this discussion feels similar to discussions around developer toolchains as a safeguard against bad code, in a way. Like, we're all well-meaning people who want to do something about this but maybe making people ask permission isn't the solution?
Scale feels like a good metric for this. Like, if you're a builder making a lot of houses get a permit. If you're a homeowner fixing your own stuff, you're okay. Maybe education? Like, "You're buying a house! Have a free handyman course on us!" or something?
> Scale feels like a good metric for this. Like, if you're a builder making a lot of houses get a permit. If you're a homeowner fixing your own stuff, you're okay. Maybe education? Like, "You're buying a house! Have a free handyman course on us!" or something?
Yep, that seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
The viral Australian "Dumb Ways to Die" video from a couple of years back by Metro Trains Melbourne included a snippet about "doing your own electrical work" which seemed rather incongruous to me as a fairly typical American with a house who doesn't think twice about swapping light switches and such. (Especially given the popular image of self-reliant Australians and all that--however atypical sheep and cattle stations may be of the average resident.)
When I commented about this previously though, I was told it reflected strong union etc. rules in Australia.
In practice, in the US, lots of people do some amount of their home repairs including electrical. I'm sure, in many cases, that work is theoretically supposed to be done by a licensed electrician, plumber, etc.
But many of us learned electricity with the understanding that doing it wrong can kill us either during the fix or some later time during the usage. With that in mind we tend to respect it and do the right thing. I can't tell you how much of what was done on my house by "licensed" electricians and plumbers is absolute crap. I take pride in what I do and if I'm going to take a short cut I make sure it's not a dangerous one.
Can't you trust people to use their own judgement as to whether they can do it sensibly or not?
No, you can't. And it's not a matter of "sometimes you can't trust people to do the job right", it's that more times than not an amateur will cut corners, or more accurately, won't know enough to even know that they're cutting corners. For example, my wife and I bought a VW Westfalia camper van a few months ago. After 35 years it's been through a few owners. I wouldn't let any of the previous owners anywhere near my house wiring. Stuff works, but it's half-assed in a lot of places. Twist two wires together, cover it in tape. I'm a solder-and-shrink-tubing guy myself, but c'mon, at least use a Scotchlock or something.
I've owned houses with outlets that had no ground because the person that put the outlets in couldn't be bothered, so they snipped the ground wire so that it was out of the way. Yeah, you plug stuff in and it would work, but would you trust the culprit to wire your house? And so on, and so on.
The summary is, I've seen enough half-assed work over the years (and some of it from "professionals" that people paid money for) that I do not trust people to use their own judgement. Do I think a license should be required to install a light switch? That's a different question. Are you going to trust the person that took a database class a few years ago to "use their own judgement as to whether they can do it sensibly or not" when it comes time to write the backend for your contact management system? I'll bet you they'd eventually deliver something that mostly works. Do you want to maintain it?
> Can't you trust people to use their own judgement as to whether they can do it sensibly or not?
Individually, yes, you can expect people to act in their best interest. When doing things for others, not so much. Look at the #ventyourrent movement for examples of the way people are being treated in pursuit of profit -- not high rents, but the sheer number of landlords that either fail to maintain, or negligently maintain their properties in a way that puts tenants at risk.
The US has a serious problem with licensing and regulation, but that also seems to be a product of their litigious culture as a whole.
If you're willing to limit your search, at least in the US, HOAs in some cities are optional. E.g. when looking for houses in LA, no HOA was a soft requirement of mine. Every house built in the 80s or later seemed to have one, so we ended up with a house built in the 70s. Some of the HOA rules were kinda ridiculous (could not have garage open unless a car was exiting or entering, wtf).
In a condo building though, I don't know how you can get around an HOA.
> In a condo building though, I don't know how you can get around an HOA.
Condos pretty much have to have an association to manage them. You typically own the interior of the unit. The association owns the exterior and the land.
It's definitely an "it depends". I'm in a Purple state (Missouri, about half Democrats and half Republicans, sort of trending Red, but with plenty of independent spirit and all that), and being about to buy a home made in 1910 in my home town, I looked up the city's code. I can do wiring entirely by myself, IF I submit a plan, and get the wiring inspected, just like is required for professional electricians.
Which is exactly what I will do, because though I've been doing wiring of various sorts at a smaller scale since the '70s, I very much want someone double checking my plans and work. And this makes sense in many ways, e.g. there's about a foot separating my and my neighbor's garages, and while more between our houses, if mine were to catch fire, the fire department would have to earn their pay to keep it from catching on fire.
And echoing others, yeah, all people, pro and diy types, most certainly cannot be entirely trusted to do it right.
> I assume this is to prevent someone from doing it wrong and burning down a 10 storey apartment building, but come on? Can't you trust people to use their own judgement as to whether they can do it sensibly or not?
And I'm sure 99% of those nightmares are caused by DIY and not somebody who could potentially be licensed. Much like the pilot who is taking his own life at risk as well has his passengers, the DIY-er is living in the house that he might destroy.
In other words, older companies put barriers to entry for new comers through government intervention such as licenses, patents, copyrights.
But even though government intervention tried to cut risks, or to ban offensive activities, they still exist. Look at how many "hairdressers" from "Pakistan" are in the west, or how much "slavery" still exist although its illegal. Banning alcohol made it go into the underground route and made Capones rich.
The decline of western civilization is happening right now.
Hair stylists work with extremely sharp implements extremely close to major blood vessels. I'm pretty OK with them needing at least some training. And that's not even counting, as GP mentioned, the dangerous chemicals that come into things like hair dyes.
> Utah's cosmetology/barbering licensing scheme is so disconnected from the practice of African hairbraiding, much less from whatever minimal threats to public health and safety are connected to braiding, that to premise Jestina's right to earn a living by braiding hair on that scheme is wholly irrational and a violation of her constitutionally protected rights.
So part of the ruling negating the requirement took into consideration that braiding had none of the associated threats to public health and safety. This sounds like things working as they should with regards to overreaching. It's a shame she had to shut down and sue, but the right call was made by the judge.
This person happened to be able to get the Institute for Justice behind her. Most lower class people do not. They simply get squeezed out, and a la Bastiat we never see them.
But it is absolute insanity that it had to get to that point. How many other people don't even bother to open shop because of this? How many shut down because it's not worth the fight?
The law was written too broadly. It happens, and it's certainly not insanity. One of the problems with enshrining things into law is that it locks it into its current state. I'm sure when the law was written, African hair braiding was the last thing on anyone's minds. But society changes, and unfortunately case precedent like the one demonstrated is typically how law evolves with it. (A more proactive approach by legislators would be the preferred method.)
I'm not worried about sharp implements near my head, but I may be worried about a lot of chemicals in that area. I also want the person touch my hair to at least be aware of hygiene issues - no fun going in for a haircut and coming away with chemical burns and lice.
Just a minimum level of being aware of your surroundings would let you know if the person cutting your hair has so low control of their motorical faculties that they might accidentally stab you in the neck.
As for hair dyes, as long as you can buy these things in regular stores, and people generally not getting hurt by them, why would the specific act of putting it in your hair be so dangerous that special government licencing would be required?
The dyes and bleaches used by hairdressers can be much stronger than what you use at home. And at home, you're only bleaching your own eyeballs; a hairdresser can affect many other people who may not be able to judge his or her ability to handle those chemicals.
You can let someone cut hair without requiring them to learn all about those chemicals. They just need a few hours to make sure they know how to disinfect things. Let them be small until they want to dye hair.
It's easy for a bunch of high-achieving people to imagine that these requirements are all great and easy to follow, but there are people in this world who are never going to finish college but still know how to cut hair or cook food or arrange flowers for other people. These people seldom have any significant lobbying voice and when they are choked out you don't see them. You just have some honest person trying to provide honest labor and being told "no" by the nobility.
The people passing these licensure requirements should stop and think really hard about what it's like for a person of little means but with genuine interest to comply with them, and only make the requirements the minimum necessary to satisfy public safety.
> only make the requirements the minimum necessary to satisfy public safety.
I'm okay with that. A hair stylist shouldn't need to complete a cosmetology degree, as in that NPR story. But I would very much* like for them to have taken a test that, at some point, at least asks them if they're aware that you can spread certain diseases if you're not careful about what you do.
You have the freedom to do what you like to your own head, which is why the gloop is sold in shops.
But when you set up in business the people paying you money need to know you're not incompetant and that you're not going to cause them chemical burns.
Some of the chemicals - (EG sodium hydroxide) - can be pretty harsh.
(I'm not sure the expensive US method of regulating hair dressers is correct, but it's not totally stupid to regulate people putting sodium hydroxide on your head)
I'm not basing my argument on what could in theory happen, but rather on what appears to not to actually be a problem.
Teenagers have bought sodium hydroxide and hydrogen peroxide and heaven know what other nasty chemicals and plastered it in their own and their friends hair at home for decades, and there's no epidemic of permanent disfigurement from chemical burns (if there was, we'd have people up in arms over these chemicals being sold freely).
In other words, the putative argument for requiring hair dressers licenses is solving a theoretical problem.
Before you start doing business with someone, spend a few seconds evaluating the place. Maybe get a recommendation. If it's busy, that's a lot of other people vouching for it, it's probably at least OK. If it's a repurposed lemonade stand in a back alley, it's probably not (even in a jurisdiction that requires licenses!). It's really just basic common sense.
> the people paying you money need to know you're not incompetant
Yeah, that is some requirement you made up. Just because you want your stylist to be regulated should have no bearing on me. Please keep your laws off my body.
I trust the average person to give safe haircuts 100/100 times.
If the hairdresser is noticeably disturbed or drugged, I'll be moving on. I can leave at any point in the process if I feel I am in danger.
Out of curiosity, I searched for haircut related deaths and they were all customers killing the hairdresser because they were upset about how they looked. Based on the actual danger, I would suggest licensing someone to receive a haircut may be the more effective method of increasing haircut safety.
You're basically arguing that incidents don't occur when pretty much everyone practicing professionally is licensed. Sounds like the desired end state to me.
I've never heard about any hairdresser related incidents in my third-world homeland either. The professional licensing leads to the same end state as a bear-repelling rock.
I've never heard of an actual bear attack either. But I still know that interacting with wild bears is a potentially dangerous situation. And I will certainly want that bear-repelling rock if there's a bear looking at me with murderous intent.
Unless they are in kindergarten, it takes about 5 minutes to teach someone not to cut skin with scissors.
It's easy to imagine that my kid wants to be a barber and so I could front the money for him to do whatever licensure requirements there are. But it's really hard for some poor person to hop through those same hoops, when all they are trying to do is earn an honest living by offering services for which people will give them money.
A lot of "well what's the harm in requiring hairdressers to take 100 hours of classes" are things which strictly benefit the middle- and upper-class (they aren't really going to notice paying 50 cents more for a haircut), but could really put the screws to the lower-class.
I see your point, but I'm not sure beautician licensure requirements are a good place to point out how difficult it is for poorer people to get into.
In my experience, it's a very lower-middle or lower socioeconomic status profession. The licensure requirements certainly haven't meant (in my experience) that we're limiting the field to wealthy people.
It probably could be better/easier, but again, given all the chemicals that get combined, the pace at which they work, and the sharp instruments, I don't think 2.5 weeks of fulltime training is unreasonable.
Yes. It's certainly possible, but not necessarily likely. I wouldn't necessarily expect to find instances of it, short of Sweeney Todd. But I would expect you to be able to find instances of infections, lice, etc.
Seems so odd to me that cosmetologists are always brought up in these conversations, when IMHO licensing for them makes absolutely perfect sense. Just two off the top of my head:
1) Dyes/bleaches/etc. are often extremely dangerous industrial (as in, cannot be purchased easily at home) chemicals that used wrong could easily cause severe burns or at best an inhalation hazard.
2) Without properly cleaning cutting tools (scissors, clippers, razors, etc.) you run a high risk of spreading disease. With hair and nails the concern is often fungal, but if the last guy who got a buzz cut had lice you're in for a bad time if nobody cleans the clippers.
This might make sense if "cosmetology" wasn't an extremely broad category of services, many of which "dyes, bleaches, and chemicals" have nothing to do with.
These are the crazy assholes, after all, that shut down businesses that do nothing but cornrow braiding for lack of licenses.
As for "the spread of disease", they aren't back-alley abdominal surgeons. The only disease that runs any real risk of being spread are lice... and there's no need to license that. Licenses don't help prevent that. Nor does anyone need 1400 hours of training to know how to identify them, or how to clean combs and brushes.
Sloppy people with licenses will still spread them, careful/clean people without licenses will never spread them. Enforce health codes instead of insisting on licenses that just put large barriers of entry in front of people trying to make a living.
Here is what Adam Smith said about occupational licenses centuries (1776) ago :
"The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper without injury to his neighbour is a plain violation of this most sacred property."
Certification driven by insurance industry makes sense, criminalizing people without licenses is a conspiracy against poor.
This article seems quite specific at first – but when you dig down, it is actually rather vague.
For example, the author complains that his mother needs a license to bake food. What kind of license? What state?
Maybe a food handlers license? These are incredibly common, and very easy to obtain.
Maybe a business license? Again – most states are falling over themselves to make it easy to give you a business license.
It's hard to tell exactly what is being argued against.
Food safety is incredibly important – and food handler's licenses are easy to obtain. States need to collect taxes, that's the basic reason a business needs to get a license. Neither of these things are controversial. That's why I'm guessing the author of this article didn't go into specifics.
The business, may require a food service permit (unless they are selling packaged food) in addition to a business license, too, in combination with food handler's permit for workers. At least, that's the case for the county where I live. (King County, WA) In fact, places like Trader Joe's (where they don't sell, but merely give away food sample) require an appropriate license to do that, too.
They are also inspected fairly routinely, and every couple does get shut down for incompliance (problem with temperature, separation of raw meat, etc.) and I can see why these would require a license in order to prevent food-borne illness.
I worked in food service for 5 years, I was given basic training on what safe food handling was, and how to ensure our guests didn't get sick, at that time in California, no license was required.
I don't think licensure brings any advantages - because dont forget - its not the business that needs a license, its the individual working for a low wage that does - its just an extra burden for the guy trying to find a job - and I'll note, the state (in California at least) doesn't even issue these things (or seem profit from them) - its issued by private entities.
For engineers who have to sign off on matters related to regulatory bodies, that's been the case more or less forever. I assume that includes software engineers who approve software that has to be approved by regulators. It's certainly true of construction plans, etc.
In my first engineering job (offshore drilling rig design and construction), pretty much all the senior engineers had PEs.
According to this article in IEEE [1] "Thirty states currently require licensure for software engineers working on systems that affect the health, safety, and welfare of the public as well as those offering their services directly to the public." That seems a reasonable source but I don't know how common it is in practice.
Yeah, and thats when you know "tech" has actually changed the world instead of just imagining it does.
A civil engineer pointed out to me that the licenses come when it really starts to affect people and infrastructure. Programming does this by proxy, but not directly enough yet.
New York State's bitlicense was the closest to burdening software engineers with licensing requirements, until the one person at the head of the financial agency clarified it wasn't intended to be interpreted that way, and modified the wording of the law.
Making people's phones overheat and changing file extensions on their PCs isn't enough of a problem
Thats all it comes down to.
When programmers are doing things that actually endanger people's lives directly, actually alter the physical living environment directly, then you will see governing authorities pushing for licenses.
Engineers design passenger aircraft, rockets, cars, and medical devices without needing licenses - the products themselves are strongly regulated. Requiring the engineers developing the product to carry licenses will just raise the overhead cost of developing such products.
I think the key difference is certifying the product when there are multiple instances of the product being made is cheaper. For civil engineering, most of the projects are unique (and even if the design is something of a copy - then the sites present unique challenges). So maybe it makes more sense there to license the engineers.
>When programmers are doing things that actually endanger people's lives directly...
Toyota famously had some issues with their software and fatalities. It'd be hard to license software development though because it's such a quickly changing field.
Since many of us fully expect AI to accomplish all programming in the future, I don't think so. Unless a licensing regime is humankind's last stand against AI.
Did you receive some form of a Computer Engineering degree from an ABET institution (just using the U.S. for this example)? Congratulations you are an engineer.
Did you receive a Computer Science degree, Computer Information Systems degree, boot camp graduate, self taught or otherwise? Congratulations you are a developer.
So you're saying you have to have a four year engineering degree to be an engineer, and you don't count a computer science degree?
Did you know that MIT, Stanford, Berkeley and Harvard do not offer Computer Engineering degrees (only Computer Science or Electrical Engineering or EECS).
Also you've completely discounted self taught practitioners, some of whom are often far more competent than people with actual Computer Engineering degrees.
Did I say this was really annoying? Because it was. At least it wasn't as tacky as posting my diploma. Please don't tell people from MIT what MIT offers.
You could have just linked to the website. :) I guess things have changed in 20 years.
But really you only proved my point. OP said that a computer engineering degree makes you an engineer and a computer science degree makes you a developer. So what does a computer science and engineering major make you?
My main point was you can't decide if someone is an engineer based on the name of the degree they were granted.
Course 6-3, the "computer science" major at MIT, is officially titled "Computer Science and Engineering". Maybe MIT 6-3 grads can call themselves both developers and engineers?
Yet another possible reason licensing requirements have proliferated is that we have a less trusting and less trustworthy society, a much more fluid and transient society, today than in the past. We literally don't know anybody out there.
Where I live, people from a wide variety of locations across the globe are constantly arriving, setting up shop, and offering some kind of service or other (legally or otherwise).
It's not clear they're offering a high quality service or that they'll be available later to fix any problems they may create. It's not clear which community they belong to (if any) and are accountable to (if any). It's not clear how long they'll even be in country.
On the surface then, government licensing seems like it might be a tool that transforms a "Random, Unknown, Migratory Service Provider from Somewhere Else" into a "Locally Known, Certified, Accountable High Quality Service Provider"
I read a recent news about proposed law being drafted in India related to needing a license for mapping the country, I clicked on this story thinking it was about exact issue I just read. Here is link :
http://www.voanews.com/content/proposed-law-on-use-of-maps-s...
"license" is too loosey goosey a term. It could be related to insurance/safety regulations, or it could be in relation to a trade group's attempt to limit competition. An article that fails to clearly say what they mean by "license" isn't going to make any clear point.
Let's say you pay some people to design a building for you. You get insurance of course. A year later, the building falls down. You call your insurance company to collect. The first thing they ask is whether you took every reasonable precaution you could to prevent that from happening. Part of that would include having a licensed structural engineer design the building. If you let Joe Shmoe off the street design your building and it falls down, the insurance company is going to say you're basically SOL, because you didn't find a person you could verify was qualified.
It's really about transferring the liability from the building owner to the engineer. If there's a mistake in the design, the engineer gets sued. Guess what happens then? The engineer has professional liability insurance to pay that! How does the professional liability insurance company decide who to insure? Well, they insure people with licenses, of course. It's an elaborate scheme to transfer money from one insurance company to another.
Is it necessary for a florist? Probably not. I can't think of a situation where you'd need to sue a florist. Interior decorator might be more problematic than people realize. First, it depends on whether it's a decorator or a designer. A designer may move walls around, affecting egress paths, and can possibly have some life safety implications, so they should be able to take responsibility for that.