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Comment by introvert0 | Hacker News Reader

Apologies in advance for being harsh, but are you a member in order of your state association of engineers, did you pass the FE exam?, was your school accredited to grant engineering diplomas?

If the answer is not, please do not call yourself engineer

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That’s not how software engineering works....

I am glad we don’t have to have “certifications” by some bureaucratic local agency to work.

You do realize you make a disservice to those who studied and worked hard to obtain a proper engineering degree, right?

Welcome to Hacker News. I think you might be lost. Friendly advice: Try spending some time reading posts and comments for a while to become familiar with the site before jumping in.

Again, welcome.

Firstly software engineer is not a protected title in most of the world.

Secondly the major way to properly learn proper software engineering is to join a top company and learn on the job. I don't see software engineering degrees containing anything useful at all compared to computer science degrees, they just contain some ancient practices which most of the industry moved past ages ago. So I don't really see how someone who studied software engineering at school is more of a software engineer than a person who designs and builds distributed systems at Google.

The "Fundamentals of Engineering - Electrical and Computer" exam requires topics from differential equations to impedance in AC circuits to op-amps to frequency modulation. I would never gong a candidate for not knowing any of those things, because we write computer software; we don't make our own servers out of magnetite and sand.

I kind of wish we did... but it's silly to scold somebody for not having passed a test that doesn't exist.

I wouldn’t mind either...

They did say "engineer", not "software engineer" - that one's not just an accreditation, it's legally protected (in the US at least).

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That might be an acceptable view in Canada or elsewhere, but it is not so in the United States.

Found the Canadian

If you follow that logic then a lot of people on this site are just pretenders. I don’t think it’s helpful to discuss the meaning of “engineer” in this context.

I am not sure about that, I want my doctor to be a licensed m.d. in all contexts.

Same with the firefighters, I don't want a firefighter to be considered as such only on some "contexts".

In the US there are no software engineer certifications. So everybody with that title is a fake engineer and companies should not hand out that title.

lol

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