A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a bit about the lack of structures to establish professional ethics within the programming industry.  In a great post about everyone learning to code Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror, I tracked back to a post from a couple of years ago where he bemoaned the poor skill sets of man people who apply for coding jobs.

Three years later, I’m still wondering: why do people who can’t write a simple program even entertain the idea they can get jobs as working programmers? Clearly, some of them must be succeeding. Which means our industry-wide interviewing standards for programmers are woefully inadequate, and that’s a disgrace. It’s degrading to every working programmer.

Yikes.  If the software engineering profession can’t even ensure basic technical competency in members of the in the field, is there any hope for getting some sort of basic ethical practices in there?