The huge advantage to the latter is that it decouples the license exam from changing jobs. This helps for two reasons:

First, it means that the friction of the recertification doesn't coincide with the friction of switching jobs. It's a lot harder to leave a bad job when you know you'll need to review for the "recertification" for a month before you can start interviewing.

Second, in these other fields your employer has a vested interest in keeping you certified, because you can't keep working if you aren't. This should mean that they're incentivized to help with the process, rather than it being something you have to take full responsibility for and do on your free time. In software, not only do your employer and coworkers not help you study for "recertification", you have to actively keep it a secret that you're grinding leetcode lest you tip them off that you're looking to switch jobs.

Since they haven't created a cert, and they do make people re-test, they're clearly doing it for purposes that aren't served by those actions.

For one thing, I don't think they'd be happy about any change that makes it easier to leave. Imagine what'd happen to comp at these companies if you didn't have to do yet another goddamn leetcode gauntlet every time you switched.

Should the hoops be a take home assignment? White boarding? Pair programming? A new governing body that offers a license? Not sure, but something will exist, and your anxiety and need to prepare likely won't disappear.

My problem with this analogy is that our field has no examinee "bill of rights" that slowly evolved over time (often hundreds of years or more) in some of these other fields. We (software developers) have no idea who will be conducting our exam, how they will be grading it, or whether it will be done consistently. We don't know if the graders are competent. There is no clear and defined study path, nor do we get any feedback. The exams appear very suddenly, when we get an offer for an interview, we have very little control over how and when the exam will take place. And lastly, we take them again and again and again, every time we interview.

I've read that people suggest several hundred hours of prep on leetcode to get ready. When I interviewed at Google, my lunch interviewer (no coding, just a conversation) told me that when he got an offer for an interview, he asked for and received well over 6 months to prep, and he studied intensely the entire time. Now, for the bar, I'd understand this, because passing the bar doesn't require getting hired by a particular firm. But if he'd missed google? Well... I suppose there are other companies, and the prep would have you ready. But also - these interviews can take all day, and there may be multiple rounds. Hundreds of hours of study and several all day exams? That actually sounds like something approaching the bar - but for just one company that can capriciously throw you out, with secretive processes and no accountability at all.

Law firms don't run the bar exam. They respect the results, and I suppose some might volunteer or work as professionals, but Dewey Cheatum and Howe does't run the bar. Also, large law firms don't claim that there is a critical shortage of lawyers to hire, all while running a makeshift, privately administered bar exam that they acknowledge results in an extraordinary high false negative rate.

I'm not sure if there is a great alternative to leetcode interviews, and I actually do respect the right of high tech companies to hire as they please. But I sure have no sympathy for companies that rely on these interviews and then wail about a shortage of people to hire.

There's tremendous potential in this space for a startup, but nothing seems to have stuck, which demonstrates the difficulty of getting companies to trust a third party. They'd almost always rather trust their hiring process flawed though it is.