I disagree. They are weak at separating the top 10% from the rest of the qualified people, but they are excellent at removing the people who have no business being there in the first place.
The first two that comes to the minds of most people are law and medical licenses. These licenses don't exist as a job qualifier. They exist as a legal qualifier. That means a gross abuse of the license requirements are cause for law suits and serious criminal offenses even though most lawyers and doctors are corporate employees.
If programmers had the realization that gross negligence could land them in jail or cause them to lose their career and property in a lawsuit I suspect they would take their jobs more seriously than merely writing code.
Programmers don't just write code just like doctors don't just prescribe painkillers and soldiers don't just shoot people. They make numerous critical decisions that have real world implications. Examples of gross failure are simplistic known security breaches that allow confiscation of millions of credit card numbers and PII. Other examples include discriminatory and accessibility violating software products.
These are basic foundational qualities of competence. In any other industry negligence of this magnitude would put in prison. Since the base line is so ridiculously low for hiring developers these are considered advanced qualities often transferred to third party firms and only after threats of pending legal actions. All we care about when hiring developers is whether they are literate and have a pulse.
Be serious, no change to any hiring process will fix that.
> They are not accessible by everyone.
Don't care. If a person want to achieve access to a given career they will find a way through their own internal motivation. If the industry wants to make the careers more accessible they will promote a desirable education path. This isn't a secret legendary arcane black magic.
