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I have a lot of friends who have passed their fundamentals exam (FE) and are on their way to become 'professional' engineers and I can guarantee you many accredited professional engineers do work that I would have a harder time calling engineering than a front end dev creating HTML files. Credentials certainly don't make someone an engineer, and neither does pay.

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Cheapening in this case refers to the meaning of the word. In this case the word "engineer" or "engineering" is cheapened as anyone can call themselves that regardless of their output. Engineering should be about lasting structures or things that just don't fall apart (provided that's the goal) than just slapping a bunch of junk together. Or to put it another way: the currency involved here isn't physical money.

This just reeks of no-true-scottsman. Many engineers with the approved title 'professional engineer' do not build anything at all.

By PE I mean: http://www.nspe.org/resources/licensure/what-pe

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