NCEES discontinuing PE Software Engineering exam (2019)

ncees.org

2 pointsconsumer4512 comments

I think I've posted this half a dozen times already but CS graduates would have needed to first pass the FE (Fundamentals of Engineering) exam before becoming an EIT (Engineer In Training) and then eventually being allowed to take the PE exam for software engineering. However the FE exam in those years included topics like thermodynamics that aren't included in a normal CS curriculum so it would have been impossible for a CS student to pass without taking courses outside of their major. So of course nearly nobody ever took the software engineering PE exam despite the explosive growth in developer jobs in that era because NCEES made it effectively impossible to even try.

I graduated from a software engineering program accredited by ABET as engineering, rather than as a computing program, which would include CS, data science, information systems, and IT. Even with that, I didn't have much, if any, coursework covering the topics needed to pass the FE exam.

The other issue is when your state has requirements for work experience under a PE. At the time, I was working in aerospace/defense, and we had almost no PEs in any discipline. I knew of two or three PEs, one of whom was a project manager and no longer doing technical work. None of them were in the software organization. Even if people could take and pass the FE exam, it would be hard to get the experience. This one is on the states, though, since they create the requirements for becoming a PE.

What makes it worse is that my undergrad degree almost exactly mapped to the SE PE exam, which was very heavily based on SWEBOK. Before I graduated and before the PE exam was a thing, I started down the path of the IEEE CS certifications, which covered much of the same topics. I stopped that when they revamped their certification pathways.

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