1. Licensure 2. Bonding 3. Malpractice insurance 4. Unions

Every single other respectable engineering specialty is licensed, bonded, and insured. Most have local unions as well.

We are not going to stop dealing with the bootcamp script-kiddie middle-manager-with-an-LLM slopcode until we have an efficient way to confer proof-of-skills during the hiring process. It shocks me that ABET discontinued the PE exam subspecialty for software engineering due to lack of interest. Maybe we'll get smart enough to circle back and demand it.

Next is bonds. Large high-dollar government projects that take years to execute because they build critical public infrastructure are often paid in terms of bonds. Wanna know why? Because if the work is shoddy or the contractor tries to skip town, the bond can be rendered worthless. But if the job gets done, and gets done right, an engineering firm can list it on the balance sheet and continue paying salaries even when projects might take years and millions of dollars to come to fruition.

Next is insurance. Hospitals already found this one out the hard way with ransomware. And for those of you who think "it's just software, it's not a big deal"... I hope you never have to bet your life on your code. I wouldn't.

Finally, we have unions. I've noticed that game dev got smart and there was a bit of organization at a recent GDC. The rest of us, I guess, have glided along on the salary bump associated with the difficulty in finding and retaining software engineering "talent". I guess we're finally seeing that disappear now that folks are trying to see how many lessons they can learn the hard way through nontechnical brute force and LLM slop. Yeah, sure, some engineers are using LLMs responsibly in a way that matches their capabilities-- i.e. using it as autocomplete to type code faster. But there's a reason why other easily-digitized knowledge-work fields like law and architecture haven't been subsumed by LLMs. It's because accuracy matters, and because those regulations have already been written in blood.

Ours haven't (yet).