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Comment by psnj | Hacker News Reader

Although it is a bit goddy for my tastes, I've always liked the Ritual Calling of the Engineer and the Iron Ring that goes with it, which is unusual because I'm certainly not one for ceremony. But I appreciate the serious tone and quiet underlining of the importance of the discipline.

I'm not an engineer, but one of my top software dev industry pet peeves: "Software Engineers" who aren't actually engineers. It drives me nuts.

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Pet peeve for me too, specially at Silicon Valley startups, where a political science grad student who codes some Ruby on Rails on the side, joins the company as a "Senior Software Engineer".

There is not one day I do not abide by the oath (slightly different, as I live in Brazil) that I took when receiving the title of Engineer.

It's my craft and I take it very, very seriously.

Interestingly, I never signed anything as "Engº Ricardo Bánffy"...

I couldn't agree more, that's why I like that in Canada you have to be a PEng to get to out right call your self an engineer on your resume or business card.

Me personally I am an EIT (Engineer in Training) which means I have a degree but not enough work experience (you need 4 years under a PEng) to be a full fledged Engineer.

Regardless of what the official reasons stated for the creation of such government enforced monopolies on professional titles are, the true motivations are always the same: protectionism. Requiring someone to have an official certification and then limiting the number of such certifications, either explicitly or implicitly by requiring extensive education and experience, reduces the number of certified individuals, resulting in higher wages.

Would you be fine flying planes designed and built by professionals without extensive education and experience?

I thought so...

I would like my airplanes designed by nothing less than certified professional wizards.

Well... As long as they are really good at making planes, I'd be fine too.

I believe it is a mistake to assume that engineering certifications ensure that engineers are experienced professionals. I think it is far more normal for engineers to do a few years of actual engineering out of school before they are scooped up into management.

My father makes good money fixing the mistakes of professional engineers. And most of the mistakes he encounters are simply the result of poor experience.

Actually, this was created to protect the public safety. To ensure that no one was holding them self out to be an engineer without evidence that they had the credentials to back it up.

The government didn't create this distinction, Canadian Engineers did. After a bridge in Quebec city fell down killing many workers in a completely avoidable accident, a group of Engineers met and determined that there should be an organization to encourage both good work, and the passing on of information to the next generation of engineers.

"The Engineering Institute of Canada agreed there should be a ceremony or a standard of ethics that should be developed for graduating engineers. They requested the assistance of Rudyard Kipling for the development of a suitable ceremony or ritual"

The goal here was never to make more money, in fact lots of engineers don't make massive piles of money. The goal of this tradition was to impart a system of ethics and obligation on graduating engineers to remind them of their duty to the public to do good work.

.joe

Maybe I misread, but are you saying a private group created a protected title?

Well obviously they lobbied the government to make the title protected.

I sympathize with this position, I really do. But in some cases, I can really justify the protectionism.

Are you prepared to call for removal of requirement for medical doctors to be certified and licensed next?

I'd be prepared to call for the AMA not to have a monopoly on their certification and licensing. As it is, we bypass them anyway by importing a bunch of doctors who went to med schools in the Caribbean. Why not run more U.S. med schools instead? At the very least, increase the number of med-school slots in line with population growth; there are now fewer med-school slots per capita than there were in 1980, because the AMA refused to allow any new med schools to open between 1982 and 2001, and has put strict limits on enrollments at existing schools. Throughout the 80s and 90s they justified this with dire predictions of a "glut" of doctors, which of course turned out to be incorrect.

Sounds fair, but that concerns the amount of people licensed, not the requirement to be licensed in the first place.

If you create an AMA2 while maintaining present licensing standards, you're simply moving the ultimate responsibility for guarding the standards from AMA and AMA2 to an entity above them.

Ensuring a baseline ability of doctors doesn't ensure a baseline level of care. It can actually decrease the number of doctors and make it harder for poor people to get care. If you required all car mechanics to go to school for a decade and intern for four years, you'd get some great mechanics. Unfortunately, you'd end up with higher repair costs and more broken cars.

So yes, I'd certainly like to decrease the influence of the medical guild. While the average doctor would be less qualified, the average outcome would most likely be better.

After seeing the quality (or lack) thereof of people who have nonetheless graduated from medical school, I see no point in having any kind of license.

Of course, people who practice medicine should not be allowed to claim that they have a degree from such or such university unless they do (just as food labeled organic has to be organic), but that would be fraud, and we don't need a separate requirement for that.

In Québec, to call yourself an Engineer and join the OIQ (Ordre des Ingénieurs du Québec), post-graduation, you need to work for 3 years as an EIT, then pass a 3 part exam about the profession.

The problem is in canada that an engineering degree is ALL that's required to be an engineer but is also the ONLY thing that's required.

I work with a team building satellites, we have physics PhDs. But we aren't engineers, so we aren't recognised professionals = we have to be in the union, we can't be mangers - while the lowest 'engineer in training' with a pass grade in an engineering degree is an exempt employee that can be promoted to a 'professional' post.

That's incorrect on both fields. First, in addition to the degree you need to pass the professional engineering examinations administered by your provincial association. Second, at least in Ontario you can indeed get licensed as a professional engineer without having an engineering degree if your background and skills are deemed sufficient. Since licenses are portable between provinces, I would imagine this is the case in other provinces as well.

"If you do not have an undergraduate degree in engineering from a program accredited by the CEAB, your academic background will be assessed by PEO to determine whether it is equivalent to the established standards. PEO will assign technical exams to give you an opportunity to confirm (Confirmatory Examination Program) that your academic preparation is equivalent or to remedy any identified deficiencies (Specific Examination Program).

If you have been assigned a Confirmatory Examination Program and have more than five years of engineering experience, PEO may grant you an interview with its Experience Requirements Committee (ERC) to determine if your experience provides any basis to warrant exam relief."

http://www.peo.on.ca/registration/education.html

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