Accreditation in engineering is about certifying some level of competence according to the industry standards and practices. To the extent the accreditation is

Accreditation in engineering is about certifying some level of competence according to the industry standards and practices. To the extent the accreditation is trusted, it means a person so accredited has already been vetted for some level of proficiency in the field. There are plenty of CS degrees with ABET accreditation, for example. There are comparatively few for Software Engineering. The two are different disciplines. The friction in this context is that many companies wanting software engineers of varying levels of experience structure their interviews to test CS degree trivia. For whatever reason the basic competence of an accredited degree is simply ignored in the interview process. My friends who graduated from accredited engineering programs and became Professional Engineers after don't have to prove to the satisfaction of some individual contributor that they did so by white boarding crap from their undergrad days: the certificate and accreditation is their proof. As they gain experience, if they look for other jobs (which happens infrequently, actually: the culture of real engineer disciplines is different from computer based ones), that experience is trusted. They don't have to re-live it, so to speak, five times to five different people looking for anything to nitpick. It's not perfect. But it makes me wonder why the CS and SE accreditations seem to have so little weight in this industry.