The article says nothing about protecting the license checks from being disabled. That's the secret sauce in a few companies, they do really interesting work.
It depends on who the customers are. We have license checks at my company, and they would be rather trivial to circumvent. But they are there to keep the honest people honest, not to stop a determined adversary.
At the center of this 'scandal' is a program that prevents auto log-out during license training.
Being licensed: Sitting at a computer for 52 hours and clicking on it before passing an exam.
What a waste of time. Pretty much an entire week and a half of full time staring at a screen to get a license to sell insurance. They were just skating bureaucracy, plenty of companies do this.
Sounds more like the license is doing its job as intended, and businesses that can afford lawyers but not bespoke licenses are shooting themselves in the foot with that policy
My heart bleeds. The question is, how hard is it for a company like that to get an individual license if they have a cozy relationship with law enforcement, which wouldn't be very surprising in their case?
Presumably there's a reasonable compromise whereby they provide a public license only valid in areas where such safety mechanisms are legally mandated.
I'm not opposing this idea, but I'm not sure it would have helped in the VW case. There were some people (engineers? Managers?) who were cheating and they knew that what they were doing was wrong. I don't believe a license would have changed that.
Thank you for a very well thought out response. You make several great points there. First of all that this constitutes fraud, and secondly that the license information should not be persisted in any form anyway.
The kind of licensing here would (or should) provide significant negative consequences for malpractice, possibly including revocation or suspension of the license (and therefore prohibition of working on projects requiring licensed engineers) and even civil or criminal penalties. It also carries credibility and protection: a licensed engineer has a duty to report employers' attempts to circumvent rules like Equifax hypothetically would have done, and legal protection for his livelihood when he does so.
It may not prevent truly unscrupulous or spineless engineers from capitulating, but it's better than the current situation.
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