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In the US there's no such protection and it's actually a good thing. We have the formal designation of "professional engineer" (PE) but outside of civil and me
by duped 2y ago
In the US there's no such protection and it's actually a good thing.
We have the formal designation of "professional engineer" (PE) but outside of civil and mechanical engineering (and some government work) it's not that meaningful. You have to complete a 4-year degree at an accredited institution, pass some licensing tests, and then apprentice under a licensed PE for four more years before you can earn a PE license.
In some states you can't legally call yourself an "engineer" without your PE license but I have never seen it enforced. I live in one such state, I'm not a PE, I call myself an engineer, I've worked with engineers for years, and even the entry level jobs in this state the title is "engineer." No one cares about it and not many people see it as worth much, unless they're doing engineering work for local governments in which case it's required.
Not surprisingly, it just makes that work more expensive for everyone involved.
Creating barriers to entry that benefit existing players in the market are not good if they don't add value. For certain projects where there is legal liability (like building a bridge, and some human needs to certify it's "good" and if they're wrong, people die), that makes sense. For everyone else it just adds overhead that doesn't need to be there.
And given that the US has led the world in engineering for the back half of the 20th century, the attitude that there must be some professional licensing body to tell us who is and is not an engineer is nothing if not smug and elitist. Some of the best software is built by people who would never have become PEs, and the entire establishment is contrary to innovation.
- judge2020 2y ago> like building a bridge, and some human needs to certify it's "good" and if they're wrong, people die Even in things like civil engineering jobs, not all of the work is done by the PE, they just need to review it as if it was their own work. Some tech industries taking over critical parts of life could use oversight like that.
- duped 2y agoThe ones that matter, do this. In many states if you are building anything for a government or business where lives are at stake, a PE is involved and there's legal liability for the engineers that certify something. But the whole PE thing is nonsense. We can get around this with malpractice policies/insurance and still have a qualified human certifying things, and reasonable bodies rejecting that certification if they don't feel the human that does it is up to snuff. The whole PE dance is just a dog and pony show.
- mitthrowaway2 2y agoMaybe we should be concerned about more than just direct loss of life? What about data leaks, for example? It might be nice if there were some risk that software engineers could lose their license over eg. plaintext passwords, or be protected by a governing body if they need to take a professional ethics stand against their employer.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoIt is practically impossible to get a PE in the defense industry because of the apprenticeship/vouching requirements. If your employer has no PEs, you can't ever qualify for one.
- beerandt 2y agoThat, but more to the point, the value of the term is based on the strong history of regulation and common use, which SWEs as an industry have taken advantage of and diminished. Which, I get that not everyone agrees on licensing law and philosophy, but it should at least signify mastery of the topic via formal education or apprenticeship. Most PEs have both of those, engineering degree and licensing internship. How many SWEs have either? I honestly don't know. If you don't have either, you are at best senior technician, which should be respectable enough, but for title inflation.
- AlotOfReading 2y agoMastery of what topic? What I consider important for my work in safety critical systems is probably very different from whatever you use in your presumably different field. Both of those are different again from e.g. GameDev, HPC, or operating systems and all of them encompass domain knowledge not adequately captured by existing degree programs. How would a useful certification be realized, as opposed to mere credentialism?
- duped 2y agoI strongly disagree that SWEs have "taken advantage of and diminished" anything. The practice of ignoring PE licensure extends well beyond software and was well established as nonsense before the dotcom boom. > How many SWEs have either? I honestly don't know. Almost all of them, in practice. > If you don't have either, you are at best senior technician, which should be respectable enough, but for title inflation. Engineering as a discipline is much older and nuanced than PE licensing bodies. If you are applying the science and practice of problem analysis and design synthesis you are an engineer.
- cgriswald 2y ago> In some states you can't legally call yourself an "engineer" without your PE license but I have never seen it enforced. You may or may not be aware of this but Oregon at least tried to enforce this: https://www.nspe.org/resources/issues-and-advocacy/latest-news/federal-court-ruling-preserves-professional-engineer https://www.nspe.org/resources/issues-and-advocacy/latest-ne...
- triyambakam 2y agoI fully agree but can't help but think about the SWEs writing code for Tesla et al
- shiroiushi 2y ago>unless they're doing engineering work for local governments in which case it's required. In those states, the local governments should be required to only use software from vendors where all the "software engineers" (i.e. every employee that uses that title) in that company actually have PE licenses, including Microsoft.