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Comment by prions | Hacker News Reader

It really should be considered. I'm a registered (civil) EIT. IT would help towards the ambiguity in hiring and the ever increasing absurdity in interviewing.

Especially since the conflicting statements of "software jobs need protection to ensure good salaries" and "everybody needs to code" are all to prevalent here.

Being a PE means you have a certain level of experience and skill. It's a distinguishing feature and sets you apart as a "real" engineer. Additionally, it holds you to an ethical code.

What continues to astound me is the lack of rigor and ethical backbone coming from engineers in important places. Yeah you're not building a bridge, but incidents like Volkswagen and Yahoo could have been prevented if people's jobs were bound by not being unethical.

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I suspect your advocacy of a PE designation for software and the discussion in this thread are slightly orthogonal. Not that is a bad characteristic, but I want to point out that the question under discussion would be similar to asking if civil engineers should prepare as if they are sitting for their PE exam every single time they start the interviewing process? Should practicing doctors, no matter how accomplished, prepare as if sitting for their boards every single time they start the interviewing process to say, move to a new hospital?

I also suspect that everyone is asking the wrong questions. From the anti algorithm questions for interviews crowd, there is scant acknowledgement that it can't be a blanket policy, as undoubtedly some positions are strongly algorithm-heavy roles. From the pro- crowd, there is scant acknowledgement that by the time you are trying to find new high tech hires through a process that bases an evaluation upon actual interactions that are measured in hours or at best days, you may have already failed. The industry is fitting an interviewing process last majorly overhauled during the industrial age that screens for basic three-R's and attendance skills onto a post-industrial landscape where those skills are barely above cosmic background radiation noise, and demonstrated achievers are as often groomed into hirings through networking over years and decades. Perhaps part of the response to better outcomes to "this high tech interviewing process that takes place in hours or days" isn't "find better questions" or "find a better procedure that still fits in hours or days", but "re-think our premises"? Some kind of PE might fit into that re-think, but the brokenness is so bad that Google has quantified the inability of our conventional processes to yield significantly-better-than-random outcomes, so it might be time to start questioning the entire premise that we can even hire based upon tech interviews in the first place.

> but I want to point out that the question under discussion would be similar to asking if civil engineers should prepare as if they are sitting for their PE exam every single time they start the interviewing process?

I suspect the typical PE exam is quite a bit more rigorous than the typical technical interview. Technical software engineer interviewees are asked to do thinks like reverse linked lists and provide the most basic runtime and space complexity analysis. The structural engineering PE covers everything from load analysis and building codes to runoff analysis an slope stability[1]. There are 9 different "breadth" exam areas and 3 different "depth" areas, and they're all covered.

I think it's slightly ridiculous to compare understanding basic datastructures and algorithms to sitting for a PE.

[1] http://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/Civ-Str-April-2015_with-...

I think what they are trying to point out is PE holders don't revisit taking even part of the PE when they interview. Is that true, though?

I have no idea what a typical (civil/structural/etc) engineer goes through when interviewing. I suspect that the PE isn't actually very relevant, though, since most practicing engineers are not PEs. Something like 20% of engineers get their PE. I'm guessing the interview process for PEs and non-PEs is pretty similar.

Doctors, lawyers, and engineers have other forces regulating their competence. In addition to licensing, they also bear personal liability for malpractice. As a result, malpractice claims that stick in those fields is significant news because it's relatively uncommon.

If it were possible to sue a software developer to recover their salary and for damages done, you'd better believe that nearly all (though not all) of the people who are rather less than qualified would be out of the profession.

> Should practicing doctors, no matter how accomplished, prepare as if sitting for their boards every single time they start the interviewing process to say, move to a new hospital?

But software engineers doesn't have any such designation or examination process, so I don't understand this analogy. If anyone could call themselves a doctor, then the interview process would have to be far more rigorous.

Also, I think doctors do need to rewrite certain exams every few years to retain their medical license.

Most everyone with an undergraduate CS degree will have taken an algorithms course. I think the comparisons with designation and examinations is drawing a rough equivalency to these designations, for example. I can't offhand think of another high-skill profession where the interviewing process tends to draw upon one phase of a career (undergraduate studies), and one specific aspect in that phase (algorithms and not say, compiler design, or programming languages survey, or software engineering, etc.), so our field might be a little odd in that respect if indeed that kind of emphasis is rare across high-skill fields. Doctors, PE's, attorneys have continuing education requirements, but I haven't heard of doctors boning up on say, anatomy or OChem for their interviews, for example.

For those who hold a PE, what have interviews in your field been like?

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