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Comment by berti | Hacker News Reader

A good start would be only actual professional engineers calling themselves engineers.

In Germany enigneer ("Ingenieur") is a protected profession title and I was granted the right to use it with my B.Sc. in Compsci (though a B.Sc. in Germany is also a lot more focused than undergrad in US afaik). I have no idea how many people in IT use the enigneer title without being entitled to, because in contrast to e.g. construction engineers there is no "Kammer" (guild?) for software engineers.

There is also higher need for programmers ("developers") than for actual engineers.

You'd need a professional accreditation body for software engineers then.

Wasn't this tried/mooted a few years ago but got nowhere in the end? But you also have to understand that for many/most of these types of professional bodies in other fields, you need to have a basic BS type degree to be accredited and this is where I think it fell down flat as quite a few SWEs (compared to other fields) were self-taught, dropped out etc. and didn't necessarily have a college degree. Maybe they can have a different set of criteria for SW field.

> quite a few SWEs (compared to other fields) were self-taught, dropped out etc. and didn't necessarily have a college degree.

Accreditation isn't just for enforcing a minimum standard of education - it's primarily so that people can actually be held responsible for bad decisions, and so that they have leverage over their bosses (it's harder to find an actual engineer or a doctor willing to do unethical things for you, when they could lose their license over it).

I totally agree with your point. But unfortunately/ fortunately, those other fields you mention do require a degree as a minimum. But again, they also tend to have larger consequences (usually), compared to a few bad lines of code (usually).

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