In California the protected term is "Professional Engineer" - you have to pass accreditation to call yourself that. No civil engineer can find work without it but no one cares whether software engineers get it.
By the way, as part of a cost-cutting measure many years ago, the state government standardized on a single certificate form for all professional certifications, which means the PE certificate looks exactly like the "Certified Hair Technician" certificate the barbers at Great Clips are required to display at their work area.
Why is it that any time anyone mentions 'engineer', some Canadian finds it neccessary to mention this? Yes yes we get it already, but the rest of the world isn't so hung up about it.
No, you can call yourself whatever you want. A janitor can call himself a "custodial engineer". You're probably thinking of the "P. Eng." designation beside your name.
Ash is right, in Canada, you can't state that you're an "engineer" without being accredited by a provincial body, at least in Quebec it's pretty strict. However, it doesn't matter in the context of this article and it shouldn't detract from it either.
Really great stuff and nice hear about a career move that made you happier :)
On passenger trains what are the people taking tickets called then? I've never heard the person driving the train to be called a conductor before since that's usually (at least in US terms) a demotion for them.
In most/all of the US states, you have to take an exam in order to call yourself a Professional Engineer, which is required for a lot of engineering professions and/or positions within an engineering organization.
Your four years of schooling to get an engineering degree had plenty of exams, spread over the four years. At most you only had to study for one or two of them at a time. The Professional Engineering exam covers everything you were supposed to learn during those four years, all at once. You can't cram for a test like that; you have to actually know things. That's the whole point: did you absorb the knowledge completely, or did you just get by from test to test?
It's done this way because, for most Professional Engineers, decisions have to be made which can cost people their lives if mistakes are made. You gotta know what you're doing before you're allowed to make those decisions.
For most software engineering mistakes aren't nearly that critical, plus for most organizations doing software development preventing bugs to the same degree that a Civil Engineer prevents bridges from failing is too expensive and not worth it.
Even in the US, it's more than that for anyone that actually needs a PE license. It's usually a test, then X years of experience, then another test. More similar to an electrician's licence than anything.
Exactly. Love to know this exam for sure. I'm sure the OP meant the ethics exam one takes after they've done their member in training work upon graduation.
Every damn time with this stupid observation. It's like an unconquerable memetic disease. The term 'Software Engineer' is a single term with its own commonly understood meaning. Commonly understood, except when someone wants to wax pedantic about that other specialized meaning of the word engineer. It is not meant to be part of a series like 'E.E', 'Mech.E.', 'Civ.E.', 'Software Eng.' It is not a case of people trying to specify which subtype of engineer that they are. It's a single term that just happens to be made of two words, and means the same thing as 'Software Developer' (regardless of individuals occasionally trying to post-rationalize it by giving it 'more rigorously architectural' connotations). You might as well argue that 'application windows' aren't windows, because you can't see through them, and they didn't evolve from the other kind of window. Engineering is a fine metaphor for much of what we do with code, data structures, data flows, transformations, and so on. Please, stop the madness.
