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No. Normal economic sectors without decades long explosive growth have some kind of licensing system to keep people out so that insiders make more money. Merely

No. Normal economic sectors without decades long explosive growth have some kind of licensing system to keep people out so that insiders make more money. Merely being able to teach, engineer or reason about the law taking into account precedent is not sufficient to get a license for it. In some cases this probably has some attached quality control implications but we know education degrees have no effect on teacher effectiveness[1] so there’s at least one case where that’s pure rent seeking, where the insiders benefit and everyone else pays. [1] It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272775710001755 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...

mattkrause 5y ago
I wonder how many “engineering” jobs actually require PE. Biotech is an another counterexample to this: there’s no licensing requirement (though many jobs do require a masters or PhD) and the interviews also (mostly) aren’t quiz show lunacy. You usually talk about your past work and answer questions about how you’d approach new problems; no one makes you (say) sketch crystal structures on the board or recite the Krebs Cycle.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  You can get into software engineering completely self taught or after a (3-12 month) boot camp. If biotech was that open they’d have similar interviews checking for basic familiarity with the field. Must have a Master’s at minimum is very different from must pass an interview as a minimum hiring filter.
- analog31 5y ago
  Depends on the field. Even the PE requires you to work in the field before you take the full licensing exam, meaning there is work for non-licensed "engineers in training." Some fields like electrical and mechanical allow an "industrial exemption" if you work for a company that makes things rather than offering engineering services to clients. An engineer is someone who might say "no" to releasing a product that might fail and cause injury or economic damage. I'm not sure what that would correspond to in the software world, where everything fails.

mattkrause 5y ago

I wonder how many “engineering” jobs actually require PE. Biotech is an another counterexample to this: there’s no licensing requirement (though many jobs do require a masters or PhD) and the interviews also (mostly) aren’t quiz show lunacy. You usually talk about your past work and answer questions about how you’d approach new problems; no one makes you (say) sketch crystal structures on the board or recite the Krebs Cycle.

barry-cotter 5y ago
You can get into software engineering completely self taught or after a (3-12 month) boot camp. If biotech was that open they’d have similar interviews checking for basic familiarity with the field. Must have a Master’s at minimum is very different from must pass an interview as a minimum hiring filter.
analog31 5y ago
Depends on the field. Even the PE requires you to work in the field before you take the full licensing exam, meaning there is work for non-licensed "engineers in training." Some fields like electrical and mechanical allow an "industrial exemption" if you work for a company that makes things rather than offering engineering services to clients. An engineer is someone who might say "no" to releasing a product that might fail and cause injury or economic damage. I'm not sure what that would correspond to in the software world, where everything fails.