Accreditation in engineering is about certifying some level of competence according to the industry standards and practices. To the extent the accreditation is trusted, it means a person so accredited has already been vetted for some level of proficiency in the field.
There are plenty of CS degrees with ABET accreditation, for example. There are comparatively few for Software Engineering. The two are different disciplines. The friction in this context is that many companies wanting software engineers of varying levels of experience structure their interviews to test CS degree trivia. For whatever reason the basic competence of an accredited degree is simply ignored in the interview process.
My friends who graduated from accredited engineering programs and became Professional Engineers after don't have to prove to the satisfaction of some individual contributor that they did so by white boarding crap from their undergrad days: the certificate and accreditation is their proof.
As they gain experience, if they look for other jobs (which happens infrequently, actually: the culture of real engineer disciplines is different from computer based ones), that experience is trusted. They don't have to re-live it, so to speak, five times to five different people looking for anything to nitpick.
It's not perfect. But it makes me wonder why the CS and SE accreditations seem to have so little weight in this industry.
> It's not perfect. But it makes me wonder why the CS and SE accreditations seem to have so little weight in this industry.
That's easy, you can thank people like ESR and the hacker mentality and meritocracy myths for this. I appreciate the underlying idea, which is the same in every skilled based profession, which is that self learning and good skills are more important than formal education and accreditation. However, the two are not mutually exclusive.
I learned to program at 8. My last 15 years of professional work have been in software development. I've led teams, spoken at major conferences, made significant contributions to open source software. I have never taken a CS course for college credit.
I've been a licensed attorney for most of that time. All it required was me being willing to spend 3 years in school, then sitting in a room and writing for 3 days to pass the bar. Since then I spend one weekend a year listening to audio books for continuing legal education, and don't otherwise practice aside from minor advice at work.
Which job would you be more likely to hire me for today? It'd be borderline irresponsible to hire me as an attorney, but I've proven myself time and again as a competent programmer.
By contrast, I've interviewed people with master's degrees from reputable CS programs that couldn't explain what the Big O complexity of an array index operation was. I've known attorneys who fundamentally did not understand the purpose of their work.
Accreditation is just a measure of someone's ability to pass accreditation, not their ability to do the job.
