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> For example in Ontario in order to join Professional Engineers Ontario and call yourself an engineer you must meet strict academic and work experience requirements[1], pass an ethics exam, and pay a yearly membership fee.

Sounds like a racket, especially given that the PEO is a private organization. I’m not sure why this is supposed to be a good thing.

> Everyone who graduates from an accredited engineering program in Canada has to take an ethics course and has these rules drilled into their heads.

It bothers me that people believe that A) ethics can be taught like any other engineering class and B) ethics should be prescribed by some professional association.

> But then I graduated and half the people I run in to at hackathons and conferences did a two week bootcamp

I agree this is a problem, but most of the actual engineers I meet in real life (i.e. people who did a 4-or-more year accredited engineering program, including some who are from Canada) don’t actually have a particularly impressive level of rigor that would set them apart from most of the college-educated programmers I meet.

In Canada the engineering associations are self regulating bodies, that is, the associations serve a legal purpose because of the technical nature of engineering. The thinking is that Politicians don't have the technical background to regulate the profession and so having pronvincial bodies allows engineers to regulate themselves. Hence the ethics part

You can become a software PE in the United States, but it is absolutely a racket. One of the requirements for a PE is you need to work for another PE. This leads to a situation where new exams, like the software discipline, have 20 people sit for an exam in one year. The transportation discipline had 1,800.

> One of the requirements for a PE is you need to work for another PE.

That's also a requirement in Canada (Ontario at least). Work experience has to be completed while working under a P.Eng.

The value of the system shows up in things like civil engineering when it is required that an accredited engineer signs off on the design. That engineer has personal liability if the building fails. The engineer's boss cannot simply order the engineer to sign off on the design, if the engineer says that you must, it has real weight.

The US has the same basic system, all that is different is how strictly the word "engineer" is regulated. And that varies by state.

Before that system was adopted, bridges fell down an average of once a week in the USA. We have a lot more and bigger bridges now, but not nearly as many fall down.

Read https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Software-Development-Sch... for case for doing the same thing for software development.

> Sounds like a racket, especially given that the PEO is a private organization.

Dunno why you need the qualifier there. There are public and nonprofit rackets, too.

Canada, along with a couple other nations I do not recall, is an outlier in this respect. As an American EE degree holder who has been employed as an EE in the past, I think the attachment of "engineer" to shitloads of titles just to fluff them up is ridiculous. However, I think the Canadian position is equally ridiculous in the opposite direction.

Ethics exams are the stupidest kinds of exam. If you have no ethics, you'd have no problem and cheating to pass.

They don't care if you know the material.

They care about having a legal lever to manipulate so that there is proof that you should have known better.

The English word "engineer" is quite difficult for French people, because in French we have the term "ingénieur" (usually meaning "ingénieur diplômé"), which is something like the big universities diplomas in other countries.

A better translation of engineer would be "technicien".

French "ingénieurs" come from "Grandes écoles", see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandes_%C3%A9coles

The link suggests that what is regulated is "Professional Engineer", not "engineer".

Here are a couple more links from the PEO website that are more explicit about the term "engineer".[1][2] Admittedly I don't know if the claims here are accurate or not, the Professional Engineer Act [3] is too legalese for me to decipher.

[1] http://www.peo.on.ca/index.php?ci_id=2075&la_id=1#whypeng [2] http://www.peo.on.ca/index.php?ci_id=2075&la_id=1#aftergrad [3] https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90p28#BK36

True or not true: Engineers in Canada wear a ring made of steel from a bridge that collapsed?

Found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring

does the ethics test preclude doing work on rayguns? asking for a friend.

Probably, engineers are required to adhere to a strict code of ethics that puts the public interested first. Rayguns tend to be developed by people with evil ambitions. If I were a professional engineer and my boss asked me to work on a raygun, I would be ethically required to refuse and potentially to report him to the relevant authorities.

my boss asked me to work on a raygun, I would be ethically required to refuse and potentially to report him to the relevant authorities

So Canada has no arms industry? I call shenanigans.

maybe their engineers are called advisors?

> So Canada has no arms industry? I call shenanigans.

Whether or not Canada has an arms industry is irrelevant to the question of whether or not it's unethical to build weapons.

Having an ethical obligation and acting on it are two different things. People can argue about the philosophy around the ethics of creating weapons. It could be argued that every engineer working on creating weapons is violating the ethical requirements of being an engineer.

It could be argued that every engineer working on creating weapons is violating the ethical requirements of being an engineer.

If that were true, wouldn't the professional body expel them from membership? Or perform some other form of sanction? Which it hasn't - ever, to my knowledge.

> and have "Software Engineer" in their job title, and proudly introduce themselves as such.

Personally I don't see a problem with this. That's their job title. Whether they have a P. Eng and can legally sign documents is another matter.

You are correct that technically they cannot walk around saying "I am a Software Engineer" unless they are a Professional Engineer. But I don't see the harm of someone saying "I work as a Software Engineer in X company" because:

- that's their job title

- the company chose the title and hired them for that role knowing their qualifications

- to my knowledge there are no legal restrictions on what title a company can give a role

If you want to go after someone calling themselves a "Software Engineer" when they're not a P. Eng I would argue you should go after the company for advertising an "engineer" position without hiring a P. Eng.

Edit: my argument here is that professional engineer licensing bodies should go after companies hiring engineering graduates to fill an "X Engineer" role the same as they would go after an individual falsely claiming to be a P.Eng.

It's stupid to allow companies to hire someone without a P.Eng to an "Engineer" role and then chastise the person for calling themselves by their job title.

That’s how we got to where we are today. You don’t get to call yourself a doctor or nurse because you have a box of band-aids in your pocket.

The meaning of engineering on the other hand has been watered down to be meaningless. There are no professional standards and no control on what companies represent their staff to be. It sounds prestigious as a title, but that’s about the end of it.

> The meaning of engineering has been watered down to be meaningless

For some disciplines like Software Engineering, I agree.

For other disciplines like Civil engineering, the term has not been watered down. No company would hire someone to certify designs who was not a P. Eng because they are required to employ a P.Eng for this by regulations/law.

This problem has come up because the government/PEO has not reacted to the changing engineering landscape and don't require positions like "Software Engineer" to be filled by an actual P. Eng.

Companies made the title worthless. I don't see how it's fair to fault the person in the position because there is a double standard applied to individuals and companies regarding the term "Engineer"

Apply the standard both ways. People cannot call themselves an "Engineer" unless they hold a P.Eng and companies cannot hire anyone but a P.Eng for an "X Engineer" position.

> to my knowledge there are no legal restrictions on what title a company can give a role

From [1]: Becoming licensed gives you the right to use “P.Eng.” after your name and “engineer” in your job title. Under the Professional Engineers Act, you may only use “engineer” in your job title if you hold a P.Eng. licence.

So yes, I'd agree that companies shouldn't be using engineer in the job title unless they're hiring a P.Eng, but that doesn't absolve the employee of liability.

[1]http://www.peo.on.ca/index.php?ci_id=2075&la_id=1#whypeng

> So yes, I'd agree that companies shouldn't be using engineer in the job title unless they're hiring a P.Eng, but that doesn't absolve the employee of liability.

So, would you agree that if we are going to be strict about who can use the term "Engineer" there shouldn't be a double standard allowing companies to call a position "X Engineer" and then hire someone who isn't a P. Eng for the position?

If Engineer is a restricted term for individuals, then it should be a restricted term for employers as well. Employers having a position with "Engineer" in the title should only be permitted to hire people with a P.Eng.

> Under the Professional Engineers Act, you may only use “engineer” in your job title if you hold a P.Eng. licence.

The company sets the job title. So if they want to hire someone who isn't a P.Eng to the role, that person is supposed to tell the company to change the role title to exclude the term "Engineer" ?

Yes, I thought my agreement was clear in my previous comment. Companies shouldn't be using 'engineer' in the job title unless they're hiring a P.Eng.

TIL I can say "I work as an attorney at X company" even if I never went to law school, as long as that's my job title. Hint: I can't.