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• Membership must be voluntary. There must be a place for people who choose not to belong, or who could not meet the demands of the certification process.
• The association's core product would be a code of ethics, binding on both individual and corporate members, with some cost (at least losing their membership) for ethical failures.
• To become and remain relevant, there would have to be some advantage to belonging, both for individuals and for corporations.
• The association could provide voluntary certifications. If the certifications were valuable, companies would come to expect them, and would perhaps even send employees to obtain them. There are existing certifications which the association could adopt initially. Maybe the association could put their brand approval on other groups' certifications.
• Along with certification, the association would have a role in providing education with certification as the end goal. As with certification, there is courseware that the association could adopt initially. Providing education leading to certification could become a powerful tool for pointing the industry in a positive direction.
• Like a labor union, the association could come to have a collective bargaining role, perhaps not for wages, but for working conditions. Some of this could happen through ethical rules about how to treat workers. If I was planning such an association, I would wait to roll out collective bargaining until there had been some uptake of the basic idea. (Bwah ha ha).
• Like a traditional union hall with members sitting around waiting for work, the association could maintain a market of freelancers who were certified by the association, or a collection of resumes. ACM makes a somewhat weak and pathetic attempt at this, but their heart isn't in it because they are run by academics.

Quote:

What bothers me about programming today is the number of people who claim to be programmers but who are not. These wannabes claim to be programmers but when you look at a wannabe's accomplishments, they usually include applications that are written in a macro language (such as VBA) and that are usually trivial and unfocused. We need a word to describe this class of people who are intelligent enough to pretend to program without actually programming. In many other career paths, they would be called apprentices.