As someone who works in a company with 10,000+ professional engineers*: yes, yes they do make mistakes. Despite what you seem to think, they are actually human beings. Good processes understand this and have multiple layers to catch and correct mistakes. But it's hard to fight limited data. Plenty of engineering decisions are still made based on numbers in photocopied tables from two or three studies from 50 years ago, each having a dozen or two data points. It's surprising how limited some of the data is that these Professional Engineers are basing their decisions on.
*Edit: okay, I don't know exactly how many are officially PEs vs. junior engineers or something, but at least that many are "PE-track".
They are not saying engineers don't make mistakes.
They are complaining that developers who can crank out garbage with no consequences and take home $200k+ aren't respected as much as civil engineers who have to get licences and suffer accountability and take home less.
Are all failures traced down to the underlying design and engineering. Granted, they are famous because they are rare. I almost linked the Columbia disaster but that is sufficiently murky between engineer and management.
Btw, the cult of the professional engineer is apparently much stronger in Canada, to the point I've actually impressed women by calling myself a software engineer despite the lack of iron ring. I wonder if this makes up for them being paid peanuts?
It's 100% sarcasm. The capitalization should have made it obvious to anyone. The only place I've seen struggling with recognizing sarcasm is hackernews.
Every time that somebody calls me a software engineer I correct them that I'm a software developer. The word engineer has specific meaning and unless an accredited university gave you that title you should not be using it.
I realize that HN has many actual software engineers, but it seems like every frontend dev today calls himself an engineer. Even on the Laravel website, the default job title for new members is software engineer.
In most fields, there is a distinction between an engineer, who designs solutions, and a technician, who implements them. It is a bit blurred for software as it is common for one person to do both the design (an engineer job) and the code (a technician job), in fact, it is common for the design to be expressed in code. And because of the two, the title of engineer is the more prestigious one, they are all engineers.
I remember seeing technician jobs for programmers (not "developers"). The difference was that engineers were expected to have a masters degree (5 years) while technicians were expected to have a associate degree (2 years). The contract also was different, usually with a fixed schedule and a lower pay excluding overtime, as any overtime was expected to be paid. But for the job itself, there was essentially no difference between a junior engineer and a technician. Now, listed technician jobs are becoming rare.
Note that it is in France, where degrees matter more than in the US and employment is more regulated, the distinction probably wouldn't be as meaningful in the US.
Are you Canadian? I thought I was making a joke upthread about Canadians having a weird unearned respect for engineers, but apparently it's actually true.
The Minneapolis I-35W bridge that collapsed in 2007 supposedly had bad gussets. Yet it had barely passed previous inspections; in 2005 it was deemed to have met "minimum tolerable limits to be left in place as it is".
In 2005 the US said it was in the same condition as 75,000 other bridges in the US: 'structurally deficient', which is also what the US called it in 1990. I'd guess that the same quality of decisions brought down Arecibo. Gotta pay the piper.
I wouldn't overinvest your confidence in these licenses and certifications. A "Professional Engineer" is just a Bachelors level engineer who took one extra test. It's extremely common for MechE and CivE. As far as certifications go it's not quite the same as, say, passing the bar exam or finishing med school.
> A "Professional Engineer" is just a Bachelors level engineer who took one extra test
At least for mechanical, it's 4 years' working experience, documentation of sufficiently advanced projects, and sign-off from 3 other registered professional engineers who are familiar with your work.
A guy I worked with took the mechanical design variant. I don't know how the HVAC variant is. The test is over the most advanced stuff you learn in your degree; the "specialist" portion of the test (what your concentration is in, e.g., HVAC, thermal/fluids, or machine design and materials) is ~25 questions and you have 4 hours to complete it, in addition to the other 4 hour comprehensive portion that's the same for all takers.
On top of that, to keep your license, you need to complete some amount of classroom education every year.
As far as coursework goes, the coursework for some of my upper-level mech E classes was usually identical to a graduate-level course, the only difference being graduate students do a research paper+experiment for a final exam and undergrads do a traditional written exam since they had access to funding and we did not.
imo this comment is dismissive and glosses way too heavily over the rigor that goes into even the "lowliest" of engineering programs.
This is how PEs should be certified. Sadly, licensure of PEs varies by state.
In Florida, the title of "software engineer" requires a license. To obtain the license, you only need to pass the national engineering (I forgot the exact name of the organization) exam for software engineering. The national exam was withdrawn some years ago. I wrote the Florida Engineering Board about it, suggesting that they needed to update the requirements.
Their response? Florida doesn't distinguish between PE specialties; prospective software engineers should just get a PE license in another field. They suggested electrical engineering.
So in Florida, the PE signing off on your buildings's wiring might be a chemist, or the PE supervising a bridge construction might be only trained in electrical engineering.
Texas has a similar thing going on (technically), but you still have to pass an NCEES[0] exam, which is not easy.
Also, if (in Texas) you stamp something outside of your area of expertise and it comes up in a review, it's viewed as if you never had the stamp in the first place[1]
