Comment by mikewarot

The criminal liability is in lying specifically about having the PE license, for work that requires it. Nobody is going to prison for calling themselves an "engineer" on their resume when they apply for a job that itself is called "engineer" by the recruiter.

You are very much legally in the clear to call yourself an engineer, even if your actual title is "Solutions Engineer" (i.e., sales).

You cannot however represent yourself as a licensed professional (engineering or otherwise) without actually having that license. That's what's illegal.

Here in Japan you can hear someone calling themselves a software engineer, fresh out of a bootcamp. The original meaning of engineering has gotten lost over the time, diluted by a sense of self-importance.

Imagine a world in which we let the bootcamp grads build our bridges and medical devices (Therac anyone?).

I don’t mean to be a gatekeeper. Keeping someone from practicing medicine if they won’t get a degree is not gatekeeping by anyone’s definition.

„Trust me, I am a software engineer“ just doesn’t have the same ring as „trust me, I’m a doctor“

The risk of criminal liability in many countries is most likely low, as long as you keep the anglicized term and not call yourself Ingenieur (engineer) in Germany or for example 工学者 (こうがくしゃ, kougakusha) in Japan, both of which imply that you have a degree in engineering.

To make things more confusing, the information technology qualification I possess in Japan called 基本情報技術者試験, loosely translated as fundamental information technician, is often translated using engineer instead of technician.

Some countries do over software or information engineering degrees, with a professional body regulating them, but I find that to be the exception.

The battle is already lost.

This is very good advice, if you want to work in Germany. The general requirement to call oneself an engineer ("Ingenieur") is that a person has successfully completed a technical or scientific course of study at a German university or university of applied science with the duration of at least three years (full-time). Each German state has its own Engineer Law ("Ingenieurgesetz", IngG) for the details, which also include the regulations regarding the recognition of foreign qualifications and fines for unauthorized use of the title (for example, up to 25,000 Euro in Baden-Württemberg).

I'm not an engineer or a lawyer. ;-)

Nobody's skirting the law. In most US states, there is a so called "industrial exemption," which allows you to do engineering without a license if you work for certain kinds of employers. I work for such a company, though I don't have an engineering title. But when we do offer a product for sale to the public, it goes to a third party for approval, and the people at that company who conduct the design review all have engineering licenses. The thing that will get you in trouble is offering engineering services directly to the public.

Now in my state, there are only licenses for a small handful of engineering disciplines: Electrical, mechanical, power, etc. I don't know if it means that the rest of us can't call ourselves engineers at all, or if we're just unregulated. I've never tested those waters.

From what I've observed, people with engineering job titles rarely do any hard quantitative engineering. Most of the work consists of organizing and arranging things, fitting things together, troubleshooting, etc.

This is utter nonsense. Words always have more than one definition.

Every term that has a legal (or precise subject-specific) definition also has a common-use definition. Engineer is no different, and the law knows and understands this.

This is why the term licensed engineer is a thing.

This seems pretty hyperbolic. Are electrical engineeers not engineers since the majority of them don’t get a P.E. Are you seriously that worried about criminal prosecution? That seems like a different kind of problem, if true.

I think it largely depends upon the state, but I agree in sentiment.

I think what I'd rather like to see is an industry standard professional engineering board for computer science. I think the field could actually do with some minimal barrier to entry even if that sounds like gatekeeping.

Not having a professional software engineering license wouldn't prohibit you from taking jobs or practicing software development, but it would help to guarantee a certain level of fundamental grounding in computer science that certain employers might desire in their prospective employees.

I agree in sentiment. You're fighting a losing battle though. People like inflated, grandiose-sounding titles that make it sound like what they do requires a mysterious rare skill.

We are builders, with some amount of analytical ability and creativity. We aren't much different from pipefitters, blacksmiths, or furniture builders, and we aren't any smarter than those people.

Sour grapes from lower paying engineering disciplines that have been hijacked by certification organizations. I’m a software engineer. I earn triple what you earn as a civil engineer, and I don’t have to pay a certification body for the title. I can also work in any state that I want, and I can move without second thought or recertification. Go cry about it.

Since we’re generally sitting on top of a giant pile of semi-understood abstraction that doesn’t have a real mathematical model and is often defined by matching legacy behavior (aka precedent), “Software Lawyer” could be a better name.

Why would you give that advice when the job titles are all "xyz engineer"?

Software “Engineers” have this magic spell called a EULA.