Credentialism creates a false basis of trust and an arbitrary reference point.

You're just arguing that you want to outsource your own decision making. You actually should interview your candidates before hiring them, whatever credential they have, because it actually is your job to ensure you work with high quality individuals.

Credentialism basically allows the sort of low effort that you're describing and causes many places to rely solely on the credentials, which are obviously never sufficient to find high quality individuals.

What are the jobs you're day dreaming about that require PE exams? I'd bet that requirement is much less common than you think.

Credentialism is for more than employers. When I need an electrician or other tradesperson to work on my house, credentials are beneficial. When plans are drawn up for a deck or extension to my house, credentials are beneficial when getting an engineering signoff. Knowing that the local medical facilties employ credentialed doctors is great when I need something done. Etc., etc.

I think complexity frameworks (like Cynefin) describes it pretty good. When the complexity is low, there are best practices (use a specific gauge of wires in an electric installation in a house or surgeons cleaning according to a specific process before a surgery) but as the complexity goes up best practices are replaced with different good practices and good practices with the exploration of different ideas. Certificates are very good when there are best practices but the value diminishes as the complexity increases.

So, how complex is software production? I’d say that there are seldom best practises but often good practices (in example DDD, clean code and the testing pyramid) on the technical side. And then a lot of exploration on the business side (iterative development).

So is a certificate of value? Maybe if you do Wordpress templates but not when you push the boundary of LLMs. And there’s a gray zone in between.

Pretty sure engineers don't sign off on things like deck extensions, but I could be wrong.

Credentials are insufficient for all of those. A credentialed plumber or electrician could flood or burn down your house and it might be hard to figure out the root-cause, so the credential slips. You still have to do due diligence to find competent people.

I'll admit that for certain things which are easy enough that you can write down procedures for them that a credential can be valuable, but there are a reasonably small number of those things in the world and even when you do write the procedures down you're usually significantly constraining the type of project that individuals in that field can undertake. That constraining is a very important trade-off to consider when thinking about whether a credential is helpful.

Isn't the reality of things that credentials are a low bar. Yes, even with the legal bar exam, or the PE engineer, etc? When you are hiring, are you really hiring JUST based on that low bar? No! That wouldn't make sense! For example if you have a specific problem, most of the time you are looking for a lawyer who has already worked for a while in THAT specific field. The bar exame is not enough! I feel that's usually the case. And that makes sense. Why just specify "PE engineer"? When there are lots of them who have at least some specialization in the direction you want?

It would have zero value in every process of vetting someone. People don’t care about years of verification in the form of degrees, who do you think will care about some “license to fucking code” given for reading some garbage pdf