In order to be fair, threat models should be taken into account. People seem to be conflating nation state operations using advanced capabilities worth at least hundreds of thousands of dollars to compromise high value targets/infrastructure with "my pet project may get 0 day'd" which is the exact opposite of being fair. Moreover, if the argument is "zero days will always exist" you may as well stop using technology entirely.

In Italy Software/Computer Engineer (Ingegnere informatico) is indeed protected, people usually refer to themselves as software developer or programmer unless they hold an engineering degree. The story is somewhat different when it comes to networking where it seems no one goes without the title. As long as you can prove you know your deal it isn't a deal breaker for private companies.

Unless memory is failing me, WhatsApp had ~55 employees (engineers ?) when they were acquired, also I doubt that Facebook is now pumping tens of thousands of engineers on a product that kept itself up with more or less 50 people. Moreover, I'm not sure what sort of change were they even supposed to bring to the app when their goal, as WhatsApp stated, was to take over SMS as global messaging system.

The question I have in regards to your suggestion is, how scalable is it ? Can/could it be applied to a FAANG-sized company ? I'm not rejecting any of your points, its just that every time someone critiques the current hiring practices they fail to provide an alternative system that does not introduce other problems (the first and most notable one is scalability, but there are many others)

I think a conversation is eminently scalable. If an organisation cannot devote 30 minutes to checking if someone they're about to hire is at all competent, then that organisation has much, much bigger problems than hiring.

The current process also requires dedicated employee time to administer, after all - this takes no more time, involves less employee prep, and (crucially) might be valuable.

I personally wouldn't draw all these conclusions from the email footer alone and I'd refrain from speculation as well. It's a footer at the end of the day, but that's me I guess.

Of course. It's an inconsequential footer and people have different priorities.

My comment was more in the sense that instead of a lack of taste it's more apathy, but it's way less serious than people are taking it

Very interesting work indeed.

I second the sentiment, knowledge of the main goal would add context about the reverse engineering process

I don't know, the name "hc based hacker" doesn't help

One reason why you would want to know how Git internally works is to make a better use of it. The interface it exposes is relatively low level and as such suffers when uses don't understand how the software internally operates. If anything, used being repeatedly pointed to docs shows the lack of understanding of Git's inner workings.

I still don't get how OP (and every person that agrees with him) seems to conveniently avoid tackling all the logistics of their proposed solution.

I think you are referring to Professional Orders (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_order) and, depending on where you live, there may actually be one. In my country, computer engineers have a professional order they can join after graduation, in the same exact way all the other kinds of engineers they've studied with do. Unlike some other engineering fields, the order does not enforce nor require active membership in any order to work.

There've been a few attempts to get this going. So far none of them have worked (see also: any kind of union specifically for tech workers).

The other professions have a "closed shop" - you cannot work in that profession without joining that association.

e.g. in the Anglosphere, you cannot practice as a lawyer without being a member of the relevant Bar Association, and to join that you must "pass the bar" which is an exam.

If we had this in Dev, then we wouldn't be able to write code for money until/unless we were a member of the Software Dev Association, and they wouldn't accept us until/unless we'd passed a rigorous exam (passing the bar is something that takes years of study) to prove that we could code. Then we wouldn't be facing ridiculous "but can you actually code?" tests during interviews.

But creating that closed shop has always failed (so far). Employers don't want it, and new coders don't want it. It's only us old hands who expect to be grandfathered into it that kinda like the idea.