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It's not possible to actually become a licensed/professional software engineer as of April this year, at least in Florida. Florida requires that you pass the NC

It's not possible to actually become a licensed/professional software engineer as of April this year, at least in Florida. Florida requires that you pass the NCEES PE exam - not sure if there are other exam vendors used elsewhere in the US - and NCEES elected to stop offering the software engineer exam citing low demand: https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineering-exam/ https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineerin... It was only ever administered 6 times. I've spent all of 30 minutes studying this, so, hardly an expert. But it seems like the genesis and ongoing purpose of P.E. accreditation is to protect the health and safety of the public. There have certainly been some high profile examples of poor software engineering affecting health and safety - thinking about the Toyota acceleration issue and the VW emissions scandal - but I am wondering if people really think an accreditation body would prevent this sort of thing from happening. What would a Professional Software Engineer be, and why would they be inherently better or more qualified than what we have today?

ThrowawayR2 7y ago
> It's not possible to actually become a licensed/professional software engineer as of April this year, at least in Florida. Florida requires that you pass the NCEES PE exam - not sure if there are other exam vendors used elsewhere in the US - and NCEES elected to stop offering the software engineer exam citing low demand... There's no demand because they made the process more or less impossible for developers to ever get to to the point where they take the PE exam. First, the candidate has to pass one of the Fundamentals of Engineering exam to become an engineer-in-training. Except, whoops, there isn't a software specific FE; the most relevant one is the EE/Comp. E. exam. Take a look at the list of topics: https://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/FE-Ele-CBT-specs.pdf https://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/FE-Ele-CBT-specs.pdf Most developers aren't going to pass that even with a CS degree. Secondly, you need 4-8 years of supervision by a licensed engineer. Again, whoops, there are barely any software developers with a PE license, so who would they get to supervise them? Frankly, the situation was so absurd that one has to suspect that NCEES didn't want to certify software developers as PEs.
kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
You can't really use engineering methodologies to guarantee public safety from software. Engineering wants to model behavior and add margin on the worst case scenario to make failure unlikely. Provably correct software development is too slow and specialized to be economically feasible. Even formal correctness is not enough, you also need to defend against unpredictable hardware faults. No traditional engineering discipline needs to do this.

ThrowawayR2 7y ago

> It's not possible to actually become a licensed/professional software engineer as of April this year, at least in Florida. Florida requires that you pass the NCEES PE exam - not sure if there are other exam vendors used elsewhere in the US - and NCEES elected to stop offering the software engineer exam citing low demand... There's no demand because they made the process more or less impossible for developers to ever get to to the point where they take the PE exam. First, the candidate has to pass one of the Fundamentals of Engineering exam to become an engineer-in-training. Except, whoops, there isn't a software specific FE; the most relevant one is the EE/Comp. E. exam. Take a look at the list of topics: https://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/FE-Ele-CBT-specs.pdf https://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/FE-Ele-CBT-specs.pdf Most developers aren't going to pass that even with a CS degree. Secondly, you need 4-8 years of supervision by a licensed engineer. Again, whoops, there are barely any software developers with a PE license, so who would they get to supervise them? Frankly, the situation was so absurd that one has to suspect that NCEES didn't want to certify software developers as PEs.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago

You can't really use engineering methodologies to guarantee public safety from software. Engineering wants to model behavior and add margin on the worst case scenario to make failure unlikely. Provably correct software development is too slow and specialized to be economically feasible. Even formal correctness is not enough, you also need to defend against unpredictable hardware faults. No traditional engineering discipline needs to do this.