I think they were advocating something along the lines of a Public Engineer certification, not the trivially useless certifications we have today. One of the things making programming difficult are inexperienced people kibitzing with management and telling them the reason things are taking so long is the experienced people are gold-plating everything. Professional certifications would go a long way toward solving that problem.
OTOH, not every engineering project requires a PE - and the same would be true for programming as well. Unless money, lives or other regulatory items were on the line then a PE would not be required. That would still leave the overwhelming majority of software not requiring any form of certification for its creators. So there's that.
OTOH, not every engineering project requires a PE - and the same would be true for programming as well. Unless money, lives or other regulatory items were on the line then a PE would not be required. That would still leave the overwhelming majority of software not requiring any form of certification for its creators. So there's that.