Hahaha. Between Google and this , this April 1st was surely filled with yuks.
April Fool's nonsense aside, certification is one reason why master plumbers and electricians make more money than master web developers. As long as we have untalented jacklegs who will work for less than minimum wage in the market, the prices we can command will be lower than they should be.
Yes and no. Master plumbers, electricians, even bricklayers and restaurants ( if not cooks themselves) need licenses because their work directly affects health and well being. The problem in any industry is usually the CLIENT. Even tho the work takes time, knowledge, materials and effort, most client will often choose a vendor whom they can what to do and for how much. This happens in every industry.
I mean , I have had clients look at a piece of code as see a … menu… and request that it not be a list (UL/OL)… but P tags instead. No rational reason , it was just THEIR SITE and if I wanted to be paid… well.
I made the mistake once to try to show off by showing another client all the different stages of graceful degradation down to: CSS OFF. Her response was to suggest 'USING headings to make the text larger even if CSS is off"…" you know that way it will look closer to what we want even if the viewer has CSS off" ::sighs:: "you aren’t going to be 'hard to work with ’ about this?
In either case, nothing died but my pride. Still many times when I see horrendous code on a site i don’t assume is just hacks doing these things, sometimes I wonder if some poor, but well skilled designer was trying to meet a mortgage payment by appeasing a client.
Four years ago I had a job interview with LARGE CORP in WI. One chief requirement was to know Dreamweaver which I did, but at the interview I made the mistake of mentioning that I did all of my work on the code view mode, and cloud work just as well on wordpad or text edit. This probably didn’t backfire on me as much as my reaction to when they told me that management staff wanted to have the ability to make changes, edits and ‘approvals’ to my work (so since they weren’t coders) the WYSIWYG was PIVOTAL ‘skill’
Essentially , may clients believe that if you don’t do as they say it is not because you speak from knowledge or experience that should be trusted and believed. It’s either because you are “prima donna” or don’t have the knowledge or skill to pull off what they are saying in the way they are requesting it.
And dont make go into how many clients want a flash site… built for their iPhone/iPad audience.
Licenses may help to raise the compensation scale by reducing the competition ( form the low-skilled end) , then again, it may have no effect other than to require an extra fee for us. That is if we as an members of the industry aren’t able to create a certain amount of respect for the EXCLUSIVE SKILLS ( “this is what I can do that you cant/shouldn’t” ) necessary for the work we do. In fact they may just serve to ( as previous post have grumbled) to make people say “my nephew could have done what I asked if it wasn’t for the big-bad-government not giving him his license” And that not so much politics as it is an industry not being able to establish what for lack of a better word I am going to term a “mystique”