Comment by mikewarot
1 year ago
>is there no individual accountability regime in the US?
Here in the US, programmers like to call themselves Engineers, forcing everyone else to use the term "Professional Engineer" or "Licensed Engineer" or some other modifier before their title. I hate it, I wish they would stop, but it's not going to happen.
Software here is a wild, wild, West. The motto most live by is "move fast and break things"... even when those things are people's lives.
There’s a few more professionals that are called engineers.
Railroad locomotive operators, ship engine operators.
The name precedes the creation of licensed tertiary education level engineers.
A lot of people seems to ignore the fact that licensed professions that require an accredited diploma in a tertiary level education program is a relatively recent feature of our societies.
The original meaning of engineer was an idle British aristocrat who liked to tinker with things that went whiz and bang in the garden shed. Just a guy who really liked to mess around with engines.
The PE thing is more than 100 years old in the US. By 1947 every state had a PE licensure program. It has nothing to do with programmers.
In fact it was lobbied in order to disinclude software engineering from it's purview in most states.