7 ms·
Don't call yourself an Engineer unless you are licensed to do so. Most states have a professional licensing board to oversee the practice of Engineering. Here's
by mikewarot 4y ago
Don't call yourself an Engineer unless you are licensed to do so. Most states have a professional licensing board to oversee the practice of Engineering. Here's the link to the one in my home state of Indiana.[1]
I've been a programmer, system administrator and a machinist. I've never called myself an engineer, and wouldn't want the criminal liability for doing so.
I wouldn't call myself a "computer doctor" either for similar reasons.
[1] https://www.in.gov/pla/professions/engineering-home/engineering-licensing-information/ https://www.in.gov/pla/professions/engineering-home/engineer...
- dinkumthinkum 4y agoThis seems pretty hyperbolic. Are electrical engineeers not engineers since the majority of them don’t get a P.E. Are you seriously that worried about criminal prosecution? That seems like a different kind of problem, if true.
- grovesNL 4y agoIt depends on where they practice. In some countries, they should absolutely be worried about misrepresenting themselves as licensed engineers. For example, in Canada, the title "engineer" is reserved for licensed/professional engineers, so it would be misleading to use the title "electrical engineer" if they're not actually licensed.
- ffssffss 4y agoThe criminal liability is in lying specifically about having the PE license, for work that requires it. Nobody is going to prison for calling themselves an "engineer" on their resume when they apply for a job that itself is called "engineer" by the recruiter.
- dinkumthinkum 4y agoGiven that companies like Google have positions for “software engineers” or “engineering departments” and simultaneously hire armies of attorneys, I would have thought this would have come up. * * Not legal advice or proposed by a practicing attorney of any U.S. state.
- nsxwolf 4y agoWhy would you give that advice when the job titles are all "xyz engineer"?
- mikewarot 4y agoI would simply not use the title anywhere. If I got an interview or offer, I would point out the problem with the job title at that time.
- nsxwolf 4y agoI think people would find that really weird. Potentially "bad culture fit" weird.
- bee_rider 4y agoInterviews are two way; if it really annoys somebody to be called an engineer when they aren’t licensed or doing what they think of as engineering work, then… I guess it is a legitimate bad culture fit, right? If that’s the hill somebody wants to die on, might as well get it out of the way! IMO — I’d prefer not to be called engineer but we live in a capitalist world — if someone is willing to pay enough they can call me whatever they want.
- dinkumthinkum 4y agoPeople are free to attempt to break from society and never use money because of some crazy SovCit conspiracy too. But this was proposed as advice and presented as kind of some correct thing to do so it is quite available for criticism. It is a very strange, mercurial position that no one should really follow if they want to achieve goals discussed in the OP article, such as being financially successful in one’s career.
- toomanydoubts 4y agoThis is absolute madness. Just accept the game for what it is. If they wanna call software developers "software engineers", what do you have to gain by swimming uphill?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 0x445442 4y agoSoftware “Engineers” have this magic spell called a EULA.
- trentgreene 4y agoYou are very much legally in the clear to call yourself an engineer, even if your actual title is "Solutions Engineer" (i.e., sales). You cannot however represent yourself as a licensed professional (engineering or otherwise) without actually having that license. That's what's illegal.
- grovesNL 4y agoThat could be the case wherever you live, but this isn't true in general. The word "engineer" is protected title in some countries (without requiring additional qualification such as the word "professional" or "licensed").
- Tijdreiziger 4y agoYour username suggests you’re from the Netherlands. AFAIK ‘engineer’ is not a protected title here (as opposed to ‘ingenieur’, which is protected).
- Izkata 4y agoI think I remember reading it's not even consistent across the US, that some states have the same protections on the title.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Archelaos 4y agoThis is very good advice, if you want to work in Germany. The general requirement to call oneself an engineer ("Ingenieur") is that a person has successfully completed a technical or scientific course of study at a German university or university of applied science with the duration of at least three years (full-time). Each German state has its own Engineer Law ("Ingenieurgesetz", IngG) for the details, which also include the regulations regarding the recognition of foreign qualifications and fines for unauthorized use of the title (for example, up to 25,000 Euro in Baden-Württemberg).
- analog31 4y agoDoes this mean a physics degree qualifies?
- Archelaos 4y agoFor example the Engineer Law of Baden-Württemberg states in § 1.1: (1) The professional title "engineer" may be held by anyone who 1. has successfully completed a course of study in a technical or natural science subject with a standard period of study of at least six semesters, corresponding to at least 180 ECTS credits, at a German state or state-recognised higher education institution, whereby this course of study must be predominantly in the fields of mathematics, information technology, natural sciences and technology, ... [1] My own interpretation is that not all of these four aspects need to be included equally in a course of study. If the question is of practical importance to you, you should contact the Chamber of Engineers of the respective (federal) state for an authoritative answer. [1] Original: (1) Die Berufsbezeichnung »Ingenieurin« oder »Ingenieur« darf führen, wer 1. ein Studium in einer technischen oder naturwissenschaftlichen Fachrichtung mit einer Regelstudienzeit von mindestens sechs Semestern, was mindestens 180 ECTS-Punkten entspricht, an einer deutschen staatlichen oder staatlich anerkannten Hochschule mit Erfolg abgeschlossen hat, wobei dieses Studium überwiegend von den Bereichen Mathematik, Informatik, Naturwissenschaften und Technik geprägt sein muss, ... Source: https://www.landesrecht-bw.de/jportal/portal/t/3ba/page/bsbawueprod.psml/action/portlets.jw.MainAction?p1=1&eventSubmit_doNavigate=searchInSubtreeTOC&showdoccase=1&doc.hl=0&doc.id=jlr-IngGBW2016pP1&doc.part=S&toc.poskey=#focuspoint https://www.landesrecht-bw.de/jportal/portal/t/3ba/page/bsba... (in German)
- solarmist 4y agoThis is utter nonsense. Words always have more than one definition. Every term that has a legal (or precise subject-specific) definition also has a common-use definition. Engineer is no different, and the law knows and understands this. This is why the term licensed engineer is a thing.
- SoftTalker 4y agoI agree in sentiment. You're fighting a losing battle though. People like inflated, grandiose-sounding titles that make it sound like what they do requires a mysterious rare skill. We are builders, with some amount of analytical ability and creativity. We aren't much different from pipefitters, blacksmiths, or furniture builders, and we aren't any smarter than those people.
- n0tth3dro1ds 4y agoSour grapes from lower paying engineering disciplines that have been hijacked by certification organizations. I’m a software engineer. I earn triple what you earn as a civil engineer, and I don’t have to pay a certification body for the title. I can also work in any state that I want, and I can move without second thought or recertification. Go cry about it.
- vore 4y agoBeyond certification, licensed engineers are able to be held personally liable for negligence. Perhaps in a jurisdiction that only allows licensed engineers to call themselves engineers, you sound like someone who doesn't want the burden of the title, either.
- n0tth3dro1ds 4y agoCrouch down and lick the hands of the mafia organization that rules over you. May your chains sit lightly upon you. Enjoy your $90k terminal-career salary, geographic lock-in, and annual dues! At least you’re grateful for the right to call yourself the title that you already earned as an undergraduate! May this affliction never effect the software ENGINEERING industry!
- vore 4y agoI don't know how you have so much contempt over the people who ensure that everything from roads to physical infrastructure in the modern world function and enjoy spitting on them so much like this.
- n0tth3dro1ds 4y agoI enjoy spitting on people that try to control my speech and my title. Misery loves company, and I will not join you in your misery. I appreciate the bridges and roads, but I will not be told what title I can have just because YOUR industry (and tongue) has been captured.
- bee_rider 4y agoSince we’re generally sitting on top of a giant pile of semi-understood abstraction that doesn’t have a real mathematical model and is often defined by matching legacy behavior (aka precedent), “Software Lawyer” could be a better name.
- mrguyorama 4y agoNaw, we should be honest about what we actually do, mostly so we can stop pretending our industry is good at what we do. We are "Framework and API plumbers" by and large, taking existing packages and just hooking them into each other.
- bee_rider 4y agoPlumbing generally works despite being constrained by real world non-idealities and things like wear-and-tear. We belong with the lawyers, who are working in an entirely human constructed framework but have somehow fucked it up so bad that it has loopholes and undefined/unexpected behavior.
- TideAd 4y agoIs that not what we're doing with distributed systems? A lot of the theory & practice of our field is how to elegantly cope with servers dying, data being corrupted, load limits of single machines, etc. We have a lot of constraints. And there's no possible way not to have some leaky abstractions with this in front of us.
- bee_rider 4y agoI will concede that in some instances we reach a level of thoroughness that could be considered more like plumbing. But it is less funny if we go with code-plumber, the goal here is to justify trying to steal the protected job title.
- dinkumthinkum 4y agoThere is a large world of programmers outside of the Web world.
- analog31 4y agoI'm not an engineer or a lawyer. ;-) Nobody's skirting the law. In most US states, there is a so called "industrial exemption," which allows you to do engineering without a license if you work for certain kinds of employers. I work for such a company, though I don't have an engineering title. But when we do offer a product for sale to the public, it goes to a third party for approval, and the people at that company who conduct the design review all have engineering licenses. The thing that will get you in trouble is offering engineering services directly to the public. Now in my state, there are only licenses for a small handful of engineering disciplines: Electrical, mechanical, power, etc. I don't know if it means that the rest of us can't call ourselves engineers at all, or if we're just unregulated. I've never tested those waters. From what I've observed, people with engineering job titles rarely do any hard quantitative engineering. Most of the work consists of organizing and arranging things, fitting things together, troubleshooting, etc.
- justusw 4y agoHere in Japan you can hear someone calling themselves a software engineer, fresh out of a bootcamp. The original meaning of engineering has gotten lost over the time, diluted by a sense of self-importance. Imagine a world in which we let the bootcamp grads build our bridges and medical devices (Therac anyone?). I don’t mean to be a gatekeeper. Keeping someone from practicing medicine if they won’t get a degree is not gatekeeping by anyone’s definition. „Trust me, I am a software engineer“ just doesn’t have the same ring as „trust me, I’m a doctor“ The risk of criminal liability in many countries is most likely low, as long as you keep the anglicized term and not call yourself Ingenieur (engineer) in Germany or for example 工学者 (こうがくしゃ, kougakusha) in Japan, both of which imply that you have a degree in engineering. To make things more confusing, the information technology qualification I possess in Japan called 基本情報技術者試験, loosely translated as fundamental information technician, is often translated using engineer instead of technician. Some countries do over software or information engineering degrees, with a professional body regulating them, but I find that to be the exception. The battle is already lost.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> The original meaning of engineering has gotten lost over the time, diluted by a sense of self-importance. The original meaning is "someone who builds machines, particularly siege engines, or who constructs defenses against those machines". Is that really what you're complaining about? Perhaps you're referring to the meaning "a guy who shovels coal into a train engine"?
- analog31 4y agoWhen people talk about licensing programmers, I always say: "Better watch what you ask for." Licensed means regulated.
- sokoloff 4y ago> Keeping someone from practicing medicine if they won’t get a degree is not gatekeeping by anyone’s definition. It's gatekeeping that we all pretty much agree is a good thing, but it's still gatekeeping.
- throwaway675309 4y agoI think it largely depends upon the state, but I agree in sentiment. I think what I'd rather like to see is an industry standard professional engineering board for computer science. I think the field could actually do with some minimal barrier to entry even if that sounds like gatekeeping. Not having a professional software engineering license wouldn't prohibit you from taking jobs or practicing software development, but it would help to guarantee a certain level of fundamental grounding in computer science that certain employers might desire in their prospective employees.