alt Hacker NewsMost engineers have licenses in the engineering discipline, except Electric Engineers. Mechanical and Civil. Engineering is based on the constraints of physics thus applied to mankind uses. Now if you talk about software "engineers" (as i am one), that is quite fast and loose.
Based on the damage done in some sectors, it would be interesting to see an alternative history where software required licenses and degrees. Certainly, the larger tech ecosystem would have moved more slowly, and products more expensive.
While EE are basically held accountable by their employers, and the physics of it all requiring that things work correctly, software developers don't have the same kind of feedback loop. Thus any country that did not play into that system would compete on features over quality. I don't think that would have lasted. Same issue with "pausing" AI development in one country.
Replies
>While EE are basically held accountable by their employers
Licensed engineers are technically held accountable by their peers. The definition of a profession (versus just a job) is that professionals as a group are self-regulating. That is why e.g. doctors can be disciplined by their College, and lawyers can be disbarred by the legal society.
This is because Professional Engineering is actually a social process, not really a technical one. The work is technical, sure, but the reason we have Professional Engineers is because society realized long ago that letting any idiot build e.g. a bridge for public traffic is a bad idea.
Society, via legislation, grants professional licensing bodies special privileges in return for exerting control over the practising members of that profession.
The reason you don't see as many EEs (or aerospace) engineers with PEs is because the products that get produced in those specialties get certified in different ways. There's no bridge equivalent to the FCC, for example.
There are definitely a ton of PE electrical engineers. The power industry - transmission, generation, distribution, is rife with them.