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Comment by miiiiiike | Hacker News Reader

I went through an ABET accredited software engineering program, they pointed us to the NSPE.

I'm not a PE but I still call myself a software engineer on everything except government forms. As far as the government's concerned I'm a programmer.

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The NCEES absolutely offers a PE exam in the US for software engineers, for about 5 years now [1]. Most states offer PE licenses now in software engineering.

1. (note the "software" in the list of exams offered) http://ncees.org/engineering/pe/

Thanks! I went through ~8 years ago when there weren't any SE focused licenses. Hadn't heard that anything had changed. Will take a run at this if it isn't too expensive.

Is California one of those states?

I don't know, but I remember that a slide from the NCEES from 2013 states that 30 states were already offering it, and 10 more scheduled to go online in 2014. So perhaps all 50 are offering it now? You'd have to call/check out the CA Board of Engineering to know for sure, unless someone here can confirm.

I went through an ABET accredited electrical engineering program, and they said that those of us who didn't want to work in government shouldn't bother with it.

Yeah, a lot of our courses were designed with government work in mind. CMMI.. Ooph.

> As far as the government's concerned I'm a programmer.

I don't think so. It's been a bit since I read up on Visa stuff (and I imagine it doesn't matter to you as an American citizen) but there are distinctions between programmer / software developer / etc.

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