Quality is a subjective property unless you’ve established protocols, frameworks or standards which allow objective measurements.

Software engineering never had any strict standards or requirements (beyond borrowing abstractions from computer science) unlike other types of engineering. You never needed any license to be a software engineer, which showed up the in the “quality” of candidates or employees. The closest you get to ensuring even quality is education or training, but even that is a wash because of the varying quality (hah) of programs. Many programs also fudge up rankings, so you have shit-tier schools (and faculty) pretending they’re top-20 or whatever, meanwhile they are global zeros.

Now it doesn’t matter at all, you can’t put into place standards and requirements you never had to begin with just because your employment is on the line. People have been shipping broken, terrible shit for years because parts of it worked, or you got customer lock in for whatever reason. Microsoft Teams is a great example of this.

Software engineering, and computer science by extension, don’t require any formal degree or licensure anymore specifically because of AI. Thank God for that, actually, because a lot of terrible-at-their-field people got ahead because of sheer luck and we are stuck with them as though they’re the “experts”. In that sense, we should celebrate AI as an equalizer. It’s a digital gun, people should learn to use it, and responsibly.