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This is one of those silly suggestions that comes up repeatedly, and solves a non-problem: In both the U.S. and Canada there are many instances where work needs to be approved by a credentialed and legally licensed engineer. Banning the use of the job title “engineer” in the U.S. would not change anything. (It would run smack into the 1st amendment though… it’s legal for me to call myself the King of France, and the onus is on you to decide if that’s all the due diligence you need to do before engaging me in treaty negotiations.)

You probably couldn’t ban the term engineer completely. But states do have pretty wide latitude to regulate job titles. You can’t call yourself a Professional Engineer, Registered Nurse, CPA, or Psychologist for example.

Commercial speech doesn’t enjoy absolute protection.

> You probably…

Yes, agreed but what is the point? What problem are we solving?

Regulation is the point.

You probably can't stop all smugglers You probably can't stop all teen pregnancies You probably can't stop all enshitification

But a well functioning society owes itself to try to keep itself accountable.

There are regulations.

The point is to have a reliable way to distinguish someone who actually accepts responsibility for the systems they build, from programmers with title inflation.

You can't easily discuss or legislate things that don't have solid definitions.

I'm glad that Alberta has the common sense to allow the term 'Software Engineer' so that the engineer societies can't go around suing people like crazy.

The infrastructure-getting-hacked thing is wild to me! Something went very wrong early in the design process!

There's internet-connected industrial control panels online where you can just connect to them on your browser or some tool and start clicking buttons.

it's probably just convenient because there's no auth or VPNs required. yippee!

SCADA (Supervisory control and data acquisition) goes back to the 50s with, yes, remote access. Security has never been a design factor (after all, how many people had mainframes in the 50s?).

So yes, from very early in the design process.

oi, you got a licence for that keyboard?

American employment licencing needs urgent review, and fewer licenced professions, not more.

So instance of SWE1 we become SWD1. I don't see the difference.

The difference is for others than "engineers" (software developers), where there is an expectation of certain quality when they hear someone call themselves "engineer". Just like the title "doctor" carries a certain expectation.

"Doctor" is a funny one because physicians originally latched onto the term to try and give themselves the credibility where they previously had none. Its use in medicine is in a lot of ways similar to the software situation.

Barber-surgeon doesn't have the same vibe, I suppose.

So language police.

It seems reasonable to want licensure on the belief that it raises quality.

It seems unreasonable to expect people to conform to your language preferences.

> So language police.

Is it "language police" that if you say "bomb" on an airplane, people might take that very seriously and you might get in legal trouble? Is that people's personal "language preference" or might there be some other implication behind some of the words in some contexts?

If you say "stop with the f-bombs" on a flight you might be in trouble only if you are misunderstood.

It's not about the word itself, it is about what it represents and the risk profile if it's true (nowhere to run to).

YES PLEASE, WHERE DO I SIGN.

The USA company my Dad was at in the late 1970s had to change all their software "engineering" job titles because the State of Texas required the licensing of people that called themselves "engineers".

The revelation came up when my Granddad reminisced laughing at the absurdity of my Dad being promoted to a "Senior Software Developer" at the age of 28.

> I don't know why that...

In an overwhelming majority of cases, I've found the root cause is simply Doing The Right Thing Costs More.

It isn't "filing cabinets in a vault" that costs more. It is hiring the people with the requisite experience, expertise and soft skills to navigate those conversations. It is pushing the technical boundaries so these decisions are automatically made upon the metadata carried along by the pieces of infrastructure we're pushing around the table. It is putting in place the appropriate regulatory frameworks with auditing enforcement that halt overzealous KPI-chasing executives from overriding the caution signals raised within their own organizations, without stifling innovation.

And many other prudential measures set aside for "move fast and break things". Which unfortunately in so many cases boil down to "externalize my costs onto someone else who hasn't yet figured out they're the patsy" in a massive shell game of "Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree" attributed to long-serving U.S. Senator Russell B. Long of Louisiana.

This seems more like an argument for requiring licensure and not an argument for using the term engineer or not

So what about like "mechanical engineers" or "process engineers" or "hardware engineer" or "biomedical engineers" etc?

> I don't know why that database was ever put into a computer, instead of filing cabinets in a vault, nor why it was ever connected to any other system, and not completely air-gapped in said vault, with manual controlled exfiltration of data upon request.

I suspect this is not because of the fake engineers but rather because other forces, e.g. management wanted more efficiency and security was the last item on the list. I don't see how changing job titles would change anything here

I think the OP was talking about licensing and regulation. Licensed engineers have more power to push back on management. It’s not perfect but giving a licensed engineer the legal authority to say “No this isn’t safe. I won’t sign off on it.” goes a long way in the civil engineering world.

Yes, because it's their signature that actually has the weight of expertise. Similarly, their ass will be on the line if something goes wrong, not the management's.

Does not fully stop the pressure ("we'll find another licensed engineer to retain"), but at least ensures a somewhat level playing field between expertise and investors.

Some mechanical engineers are "professional engineers". That title is a legal liability for messing up. While most of the work designing a skyscraper belongs to any civil engineer, it won't be built until a professional engineer puts his legal mark on it being safe. In turn a professional engineer has the power and legal responsibility to tell management no and he will win against all their pressure. (though sometimes that means the company builds nothing and goes out of business forcing him to find a new job)

FYI: Mechanical and hardware engineers, in the appropriate language of the country, are already protected engineering titles in a lot of European countries.

Calling yourself a „dipl. Ing. <X>“ would be a crime if you don’t possess the appropriate degree.

Yes, but at least in Germany the "Dipl." makes the difference. I think it'd be OK to call yourself a "Software Engineer" without a degree and this is what many people do.

AFAIK the actual reason why „Software Engineer“ is ok is because it’s in English.

Pretending to be an „Ingenieur“ is illegal unless you have the paper to back it up. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be a university paper, there are older trade papers that also work.

I thought so too, but I lost that argument a couple of years ago and was persuaded that "Ingenieur" alone can't be challenged.

Unfortunately I don't remember the details. I'd be happy to learn I was right after all;-)