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Comment by mcpackieh | Hacker News Reader

Why should they settle for lesser protection of the word engineer when they're winning their legal battles to protect the word engineer itself?

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I'm not sure I'd base the nomenclature of society around whether or not The Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of B.C can win a lower court legal argument. It's also quite absurd in America where Sam Altman and Elon Musk personally coded tech companies (zip2, loopt) but now are derisively called businessmen and non-technical. Clearly "engineer" has a broad general meaning accepted by society which is clearly more broad than an association can gatekeep.

The intent at least in Canada is that "engineer" should be as guarded as "veterinarian" or "lawyer" or other titles which tend to strictly imply a registered profession. This isn't novel but the status quo, effectively, and until "software engineer" started showing up everywhere the professional engineer associations were pretty consistently successfully defending their exclusivity.

I don't think "engineer" has a broad general meaning any more than "veterinarian" in the context of professions. I do think that "software engineer" does have broad general meaning, however.

Sure but he has a university degree in engineering and was a titled hardware engineer for 9 years. To me, it's kind of like not being able to call yourself a network engineer or sysadmin because your CompTIA certificate expired.

From what I can tell, "engineer", as used for denoting someone has been certified in something, is a somewhat recent 20th century trend. Prior to that, engineer was what you called someone who did the thing (I.e. railroad engineer), not the certificate needed. Indeed, having a certificate for engineering at all is a recent invention.

So it would seem this ruling goes against historical usage.

> engineer was what you called someone who did the thing (I.e. railroad engineer), not the certificate needed. Indeed, having a certificate for engineering at all is a recent invention.

Umm, no. It is true that train drivers were called "engineers" because they operated an engine.

But the title "engineer" goes back much further than that. It comes from "military engineer", where "engine"/"engineer" meant "machine" or "ingenious".

Military engineers have been around for a very long time. Around the time when the industrial revolution started, people who worked with non-military engineering started to be called "civil engineers".

They mostly worked on building roads and bridges, which is where today's "civil engineer" comes from. But in countries like Sweden, "civil engineer" (civilingenjör) has remained a title for all engineers, not just road/bridge-builders.

> having a certificate for engineering at all is a recent invention

Not that recent, higher engineering education started in the 1700s in Europe.

Seems kind of quixotic for a country of 38 million people to try to maintain a different definition of a common word than the other 400 million native English speakers and >1 billion non-native speakers in the world.

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