As with anything, professional licensure can make things better or worse.

What tends to happen with professional licensing is that barriers to entry are erected, reducing the supply of labour and artificially increasing the price of labour for existing software engineers.

See cosmetology licenses for example: it is ludicrous that it is illegal to shampoo someone's hair in New York without completing a 1,000 hour course of study or having 5 years (!!!) of experience [1]. Yeah, sure, you shouldn't be spreading diseases or anything, but this is far, far beyond that.

A less ridiculous example: doctors. In the US, there is a hilariously restrictive number of residency places available, and this number is set by the government and backed by the American Medical Association. This inflates doctors' wages and makes it much harder to become a doctor than is necessary. There's a strong case for licensing doctors, but the particular way it's done in the US is obviously suboptimal.

My point is that yes, politicians writing regulations wrong will hurt the industry, but strangling the industry by limiting the number of software engineers can also cause harm.

I believe you know this already ("my proposal isn't perfect") so don't take this as an argument, I'm just making the possible downsides explicit and adding some detail.

[1]: https://dos.ny.gov/cosmetology

Some of the best developers I know are self taught. Professional licensure makes it illegal for them to practice, or at least relegates them to low end work. It further cements the requirement that someone go deeply into debt to purchase the right to work from a university.

It also creates artificial scarcity which will easily 10X costs.

Dealing with security problems is much cheaper.

For non safety critical software, this would be absolutely unacceptable to me. We don't want any more gatekeepers who get to control who can participate or not in the industry.

Such gatekeeping almost always ends up preventing new innovative entrants from coming in. It protects those who have the certification from competition. Thus leading to stagnation in the industry.

My problem with self-regulation is that time for that was 10 years ago. Maybe 20 is too much, but certainly over a decade ago... The industry had their change, they fully squandered it. Now it is time for the whip.