US to require licenses for designers

April Fools joke aside, Ive always considered web designers to be basically “front-end” and web developers to be “back-end”. I can understand certification for jobs such as electricians and plumbers as there is a definite safety aspect but for anything in the general it industry there isnt too much point as for one thing a % of what you learn will probably be out of date by the time you sit an exam. I think that vendor-specific qualifications aren’t too useful as you might study one then find a future employer uses another manufacturer. Some can be very expensive, for example i think the CCNA one costs a few £k to do initially and has to be renewed every so many years (may be yearly) and if you have any of the “follow-on” qualifications from the CCNA and the CCNA expires then all the “follow-on” ones expire as well.

I would rather go for one like the Network+ which afaik is vendor-independent, but then it raises the question of what countries are they “valid” in. A qualification or certification in one country might not be worth the paper it’s written on in another country which may have its own qualifications or certifications.

The last time I had as flick through at web design and/or development job adverts (within 50ish miles from where I live), they all basically emphasised experience over qualifications.

But then there are front-ed web developers, too (like those who do JS, web apps and so on). :rolleyes:

Anyhow, I was thinking that, short of some kind of official web dev certification (which would have a lot of problems anyway) there could at least be an official set of benchmark skills on a website somewhere, and designers/devs could could indicate which of those skills they have. Of course, there’s no guarantee that people would be honest, but at least it would provide some kind of reference point for those looking for a service provider, and there could be a list of criteria for each skill that potential clients could quiz the designer about.

A reference like that would provide a guide for devs as well as customers. If each skill are had a detailed list of what skills are really required for a particular area, it would at least nudge web people to challenge themselves to make sure they had everything under their belt. A lot of web devs aren’t even aware of the skills they lack (such as having next to no awareness of accessibility, unobtrusive JS etc.)

Lee, the CCNA refresh/renewal historically is about every three years; I did do the CCNA course and passed with all four Certificates. Though I didn’t think it was worth doing the CCNA Certified exam, which is just two practicals and two exams. All they do is just combine Semester (1 and 2) then (3 and 4) material. So you just get tested twice again [1-2], [3-4], on what you covered before, i.e. the previous 4 times [1, 2, 3 and 4] (4 course exams and 4 course practicals) to gain the 4 certificates. Yes, it would be expensive to take the actual CCNA Certified exam itself and keep it renewed.

Well, I didn’t take the time to read what a lot of you posted, but here are my thoughts on what we’re witnessing here.

FACT: The United States is on its way to becoming the deepest tyranny the planet has ever seen. The United States is also the most oppressive police state in the world, locking up the highest percentage of its citizens, followed by Russia and China.

You think you live in a free country? Think again.

This all ties in to the criminal federal government’s war on internet freedom. The “big six” corporations own the print media and television news, which they dictate what the dumbed-down American populace is allowed to know. A great threat to the power structure (symbolized by the pyramid with the illuminated eye at the pinnacle- see my avatar) is the freedom of information that the internet allows. The internet is the last beacon of true democracy, so they will crack down any way they can, especially as the world’s economic system is collapsing and awareness of tyranny is skyrocketing- people are hungry for information that’s more accessible on the internet than anywhere else. The criminal government tried to shut down the free internet under the ruse of “copyright infringement” with legislation like CISPA, SOPA, & ACTA, but it didn’t work as those bills were met by fierce resistance from a fed-up public.

Internet freedom is being shut down a la carte. In order to be a web designer, they’ll mandate you have a license. They will take little baby steps until the web is totally censored, and only those who are accepted by the state will be allowed to publish web content.

It is all connected to the war on freedom.

This can only happen if the slaves (the people) allow the corrupt criminal elite to carry out their agenda without saying ‘No’ or just totally disregarding their implied authority in mass.

I, for one, will never adhere to any more mandates the criminal government puts on us. They’re not our masters. They work for us. It’s time to show them and STAND UP AND WALK OUT OF THEIR CRIMINAL SYSTEM.

I WILL NOT BE BULLIED INTO SUBMISSION.

Unrelated:
Are you people aware that the NDAA 2012, Sections 1021 & 1027, gives the criminal federal government the power to indefinitely detain, assassinate, and disappear U.S. citizens on American soil?

Anything the government does now is to wage war on you and create a global system of enslavement! They can do nothing good!

PSSST…it was an April Fools joke…

I’m glad it’s a joke! :rofl:.

That doesn’t negate nor make light of what’s coming down the pipe in AmeriKa.
Yes, they are increasing mandates, and, yes, there is a net loss of freedom not only in AmeriKa, but across the globe.

<snip>

Sometimes it amazes me how much people forget that the world was going to pot several years ago, and also several decades ago, and also several centuries ago. There’s only one way to fix this old, old, old problem: get rid of people.

This may get me reprimanded on these boards because people, largely…

Actually, it would be the complete breaking of the very clear rules about posting politics and religion. The rules say: don’t do it. Not unless it’s governments hurting their citizens by making inaccessible websites, for which they should be forced to watch endless Wiggles reruns.

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”

Oh, and by the way, God Bless you all for what you do for me here at the SitePoint Forums. Blessings.

Yes, etidd, great stuff happens here. :slight_smile:

I hate to do it, as I enjoy a good political rant, but as Stomme noted, it’s been decided not to allow political discussions around here, as they (understandably) get too heated, and are not what we’re here for anyway. So no offense intended, but I thought it best to remove a few comments above.

Okay, Ralph, I know politics isn’t what we’re here for. Like I said, I have other venues for political activism.

Although, this post is of a political matter and the original poster asked for thoughts on the subject; so, I’ll make it quick and simple.

I staunchly disagree with any mandates on web developers to be licensed.

God Bless,

Tyler

True, although it was intended as a joke, of course.

I staunchly disagree with any mandates on web developers to be licensed.

Agreed, it’s not workable, and open to corruption. Fun to have a laugh about, though. :slight_smile:

There is a safety aspect to what we do though - data safety, prevention of identity theft. Part of solving the problem of internet crime is removing the ease of it. The only way to do that is to raise the bar on how secure sites are. If we ever see certification for web developers it will likely be caused by a need to rachet up security on sites. I can certainly see a certification requirement be put in place to develop websites for government and financial entities and their immediate partners. Once that standard is set it will tend to propagate.

Indeed. There are pretty stiff penalties already in place for not dealing with personal info like credit cards properly. Even recently, I’ve seen companies with thousands of completely unprotected credit card numbers in their system. :eek: It’s amazing this still goes on. At least it’s not hard to get them to fix the situation. (You only have to mention the hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines they are liable for if anyone finds out.)

Yes, Ralph, there are stiff penalties in place for businesses who do not properly secure sensitive data. Those penalties would include hackers getting a hold of credit card information and other sensitive data, putting the parties at a loss in position to sue the pants off the entity, probably for such losses that would put the firm out of business. It’s called an infringement of the common law.

Where I think most of you are getting conned is that the government should not stand to gain from such infringements (the government has no “Corpus Delicti”- look it up in Black’s Law Dictionary), which means it’s not lawful for the government to collect go money.

Certainly, it is possible for an entity other than the government to set licensing standards (licensing doesn’t sound like a bad idea in and of itself), but beware the notion that “More Government is the Answer”. Soon, they’ll be deciding who can be posting web content, and we all know the repercussions to free speech rights when big Gov. decides who gets licensed as a developer and who doesn’t.

Damn, here there are no penalties for that kind of crap. $husband’s motorcycle-lesson teacher (who owned that business) tried to find hosting. $husband built a simple Perl backend that could do everything, but the hosters in question stated they only did PHP. As $husband looked into their setup, they did all the obvious mistakes (very open to SQL injection, incorrect certificates and a bizaare mail server setup with incorrect settings… you could log into any of their customers’ accounts simply by having access to one of the accounts!), and they kept stating everything wrong was at the business-owner’s end. They finally went out of business, fortunately, but the number of monkeys who got their hands on a server and say “Hey! Let’s start a hosting company! We’ll learn on the job!” is sadly high.

AT&T didn’t get into any trouble leaving emails sitting out in the open for those iPhone owners, but the guy who wrote a little script to send in iPhone ID’s (via an open, public URL) to get the resulting related e-mail address, he’s getting some ungodly amount of time behind bars (yeah, he’s douchebag material in many ways, and that didn’t help his case…). This is a bad judicial setup: allow companies to be sloppy with user data, wait until there’s a leak, then hope it was done by white-hats or grey-hats so you know who they are and can punish them. If it’s black-hatters who don’t tell anyone and just sell the info? Oh, whoops. But let’s not make companies accountable anyway. Same goes for the Sony story.

Security guys are like accessibility guys in that they feel their area should be a major basic part of web development, but isn’t.

I don’t think that having to be licensed or certified in one’s industry is necessarily a bad thing. Although the article is a joke, I would not put it past our government here in Canada to regulate some sort of licensing requirement if there was a fee involved and if it was easy to get certified. Would be just another tax :rolleyes:

It would be impossible to have any kind of certification for Web Developers. As Sitepointers know the coding world is changing so fast that last year’s code is already becoming obsolete.

Five years ago we weren’t too concerned about mobile and responsive design (or I wasn’t in corporate targeted world.) I had the opposite problem, large companies and banks were still using IE6 and, even worse, Lotus Notes as their default browser! You can’t just tell these people they need to upgrade. Legacy is still a huge issue. They don’t teach that in school. Up next - whose ready for coding for watches?

The opposite end of the spectrum is that coding for emails has to be done with HTML 1.0 :wink: - they don’t teach that in school either (I would guess). In fact that was my trick question when I interviewed freelancers to fill in for me while I was on holiday a few years ago. I handed them one of our complicated email layouts and said, “how would you code this?” The winner said “the most basic HTML possible.”

So certification is a ridiculous idea, new coding languages and methods are changing too quickly.

On the other hand designers are a dime a dozen - everyone wants to be a designer (or a photographer, or a film director, or a “musician”) yawn…

Then there’s the crazy notion being promoted now by people in ‘higher learning’ that “everyone should learn to code.” I don’t agree. Not unless you have endless patience, enjoy endless frustration, and can shrug away the stress that comes with the phrase that I live in fear of - that keeps me up at night, “…and how long will it take?”

I’m glad to hear that I’m not the only one who experiences it like this!

Hi Ralph,

Thanks. Nice to have a “brother in arms”! Because as you know, the background to that is that whatever your answer is to that dreaded question, your only ever given half that amount of time.

I always tell people a Web Developer is like a Combat Soldier, you prepare and you wait for battle and you never know when it’s going to come.

Charles
P.S. I was in Melbourne in 2010 - wanted to drop by the Sitepoint Mecca but there wasn’t enough time.