> The professional title "engineer" is legally protected under the German Engineering Act [0].
[0] https://verwaltung.bund.de/leistungsverzeichnis/EN/leistung/...
People protecting titles by putting an arbitrary barrier associated with possessing a piece of paper rather than actually having skill and knowledge should be treated with scorn in my opinion.
[1] “Heaviside step function” and the “Coverup” method for partial fraction expansion when doing integrals are among his discoveries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside
I've been to work social events where all the alcohol was provided by the company, but they still had to hire a bartender. You'd pick up a drink, hand it to the bartender, and they'd open it and give it back to you. It sure seems like a stupid, wasteful ceremony; that is, until someone is on their way to getting blackout drunk and the bartender can start refusing to open more drinks for them. They can even use the line "I could lose my bartending license if I keep serving you." The requirement for a licensed bartender was not to make sure someone knew how to open the drinks, it was to make sure someone had the authority and accountability for keeping things under control. (Not to mention making sure everyone was over 21.)
Requiring a stamp from a licensed professional seems pointless up until it prevents a big problem. I'm not opposed to requiring that a Licensed Software Engineer (or whatever) sign off on the software running on chemotherapy machines, as long as that licensing is all done in good faith.
The number of PEs in the US seems to be around 500,000 per NCEES. That represents way more than 1% of all "engineers" -- there are not 50 million "engineers" in the US, unless Subway has started calling their employees "Sandwich Engineers" now. What are you counting as an engineer, if not a PE? For this discussion, an engineer would be someone working in a profession where a PE license is available, matching their day-to-day work. You could say "what about software engineers?" but that will skew your numbers, because we don't know how many SEs would be licensed PEs if a licensing program was available (which is kinda what we're discussing here).
The question is: for those professions where a PE license is available, how many get it? This is a number that seems a bit hard to find, but the consensus seems to be around 20%. So you're off by a factor of 20x. Please don't just make up random stats, or you will be contributing to the misinformation in the world.
I also don't care about the numbers of an organization who has a conflict-of-interest in the matter. I teach graduate level engineering classes and I know for a fact that almost nobody in my classes goes for the PE license. That is representative enough for me over the years.
You should also have mentioned that: "This riled Heaviside, who asked Thomson to sponsor him, and along with support of the society's president he was admitted 'despite the P.O. snobs'".
What’s your solution then? No attempt at providing professional standards at all?
Systems made by people will always be flawed. That is the reason for and criticism of certification and regulation.
Like, you’re developing some land, and it turns out you need a geotechnical engineer. The engineer you hired is certified, their plans get put on file with government records office, and the contractors you hire are responsible for following those plans. Among other things, it creates a paperwork trail to figure out who gets the blame if your building collapses and takes out three neighboring apartment complexes with it.
I think we should have these kinds of rules for people who design bridges, medical equipment, and passenger airplanes. I don’t think we should have these rules for people who design hard drive controllers, compilers, and physics simulation software.
You mean the hard drives that are storing inspection records for those bridges, and the compilers that were used to build that medical-equipment software, and the physics simulation software that was used to verify the required load strength of that passenger airplane?
Verified programming languages and compilers for safety critical systems are a thing. Khronos even has some APIs for use in safety critical applications.
I fixed this for you.
"I disagree with the sentiments, there is no societal need for gatekeepers in most professions. The engineer title rarly comes with legal liabilities. It’s not necessarily just about gatekeeping. Of course it often becomes misused as well."
IMHO by doing this and going against quaternion he has hindered much progress in EM for more than century since that's what being taught in textbook, and most people including EM engineers don't care to look what's available beyond the run-of-the-mill textbooks.
There's a very famous saying by Einstein, make it simple but not simpler, and in this case Heaviside's "Vectors Versus Quaternions" paper and related advocacy has caused more harm than good to the math, science and engineering of EM based system by doing simpler than simpler (pardon the pun).
I have also a hypothesis that perhaps someone can research into, if Einstein is exposed properly to quaternion based EM, and using it he would have solved the general theory of relativity much earlier than he took of 10 years after the special relativity discovery. The quaternion form of relativity has been even presented by L. Silberstein in 1908, just three years after the discovery of special relativity [3].
It is a shame that even today apparently the Wikipedia entry of both special relativity and general relativity do not even mentioned quaternion (zero, nada, zilch) as if it is a taboo to do so, perhaps partly thanks to Heaviside of his seemingly very successful propaganda even after more than century of progress in math, science and engineering.
[1] Vectors Versus Quaternions (1893):
https://www.nature.com/articles/047533c0
[2] General relativity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity
[3] Quaternionic Form of Relativity. L. Silberstein (1912) [PDF]:
https://dougsweetser.github.io/Q/Stuff/pdfs/Silberstein-Rela...
Would you say the same about a medical degree ? How do you judge skill and knowledge in medicine without a professional association ?
Software engineering is lucky not to have the shackles that medicine had here. The door is more open. We still require people to prove their capabilities but we don’t allow organisations such as engineering or medical associations to add limits.
https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/international-doct...
It's very HN and self-aggrandizing to act like the software 99.9% of us are writing is so important that it needs gatekeep credentials. And the important software that does exist already needs its own processes for quality and safety, not depend on software engineers having some feelgood credentials.
If its status you want, then just get a higher status tech job.
The response given to Heaviside does suggest that snobbery was a more likely reason for refusing his membership, but that's just my impression.
As a fun bit of trivia: entwickeln also means to unravel, with ent=un and wickeln = to ravel.
So you'd better err to the side of being a software developer, because you'd always be telling the truth (and hope your subtly arrogant German engineer colleagues don't pick on you).
It's like telling Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, George Benson, or Wes Montgomery that they're not qualified to teach at a music conservatory because they lack formal diplomas. Sure, technically they're not "certified," but put them next to your average conservatory professor and they'll play circles around 99.99% of them.
Same goes for brilliant coders versus formal engineers.
The only ones I can think of are folks who are self-taught, e.g., Bill Gates, but he famously noted that he had read the three (then extant) volumes of Knuth's _The Art of Computer Programming_, sometimes taking an entire day to contemplate a single page/idea/exercise (and doing all the exercises) and then going on to say that anyone who had read all three volumes (and with the unspoken caveat of "also done all the exercises") should send him a Résumé.
My best friend in high school was a self-taught guitarist, incredibly talented, he also had perfect pitch, and a wonderful insight into what a given piece of music was expressing.
All? of the original self-taught programmers were in an academic context, no? Even those who aren't have either read or researched a great deal, or they have laboriously re-created algorithms and coding concepts from first principles.
Maybe this is just another example of how society has not yet mastered the concept of education?
>There are masters of a thing, and then there are masters of a thing.
Where the difference is, some folks can do, but can't teach/communicate what they do or how they do it, while other folks have both mastered a skill, and are able to raise others up in how to also learn that skill.
My guitar-playing friend also would wear out cassette tapes and records playing back specific sequences working out how they had been played, and perfecting his technique....
You also don't always get a say what they put in your sig or on your business card (and I think internal names would not matter anyway).