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Comment by abduhl | Hacker News Reader

Let's not oversell the PE or the FE: I took both drunk and completed them in under 3 hours each.

The true point of being a professional engineer is that you've satisfied the MINIMUM requirements to be licensed and, therefore, you are licensed by the state to sign off on documents within what you consider your expertise. It relies on you to make that determination with the understanding that you should know better, recognizing the legal and professional ramifications if you practice outside your expertise.

I disagree with the Oregon ruling: holding yourself out as an engineer without licensure is not acceptable and should not be encouraged. It creates confusion amongst the public about what a licensed engineer is and who to trust.

The guy could have easily put out his findings as an interested party or something without trying to invoke the goodwill that people like you and I have put so much effort into engendering.

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If he were holding himself out as a "professional engineer," I'd absolutely agree with you. However, there are entire fields of engineering that have largely ignored the PE. Good luck finding a PE, for example, to work under if you're an electrical engineer to even be eligible to sit for the PE exam. I don't think such engineers are any less engineers because they lack a PE.

Yeah. In the US, I believe the software engineering PE is actually being discontinued after this year.

I got an Engineer-in-Training certificate out of school (basically taking a GRE-type exam) because, in the field I was working in at the time, senior engineers got PEs so they could sign off on blueprints for regulatory agencies. And, in due course, I would have gotten one.

But anyone who thinks there's something special about working for a few years in the industry and then taking a few hours of tests... I'm not violently against these types of certifications but they tend to become artificial barriers (degree requirements, specific work experience, and the certification itself) and don't really indicate a lot.

Absolutely there are entire fields that have abandoned licensure or have no real need for licensure. These are usually fields where designs are not public facing or reviewed by a state agency and so no implied liability occurs.

However, I think it is incredibly important to note that the story in question had a guy who was claiming to be an engineer and talking about traffic signal timing. Traffic engineering (and all other subsets of civil engineering) is definitely NOT one of the fields that has abandoned licensure. Civil engineering has the highest percentage of licensure of any engineering discipline that I know of. Anything related to a traffic signal, in my experience, has had to be dual stamped by both a licensed civil engineer for the traffic and electrical engineer for the light.

Sure, traffic engineering requires a stamp. Traffic light timings? That's a little rich considering the guy who created the formula in question was a physicist who never held a PE.

My friend is actually a EE (graduated with him) and he went to work at the highway department as a civil (had a family member that worked there and wanted to stay home). I just remembered that we talked many a moon ago and he told me the traffic light timings were in a table which made zero sense. I believe he changed the timing, but not sure.

This is false. My company has about 200 electrical engineers (I'm one) and there are probably 50 that have a P.E. and many in management...finding someone above you that you've worked for/with is not difficult and I say that as someone whose company puts nearly zero value on it. If I ever change jobs though, it could be valuable. My father is also a EE and his was required to advance.

I'm an electrical engineer, too, and my experience working for small companies in Silicon Valley is that nobody has a PE. Are you by any chance working in power? That's the one place I've commonly seen EE PEs.

There isn't one legal definition and it was being used to silence a member of the public pointing out that they are stealing from the public by designing unsafe traffic lights.

Some clients of certain kinds of engineering demand this certification. But not all clients, and not all engineering fields. A post-academic license doesn’t an engineer make. It’s like saying you can’t call yourself tech support without getting a Red Hat Certification (ignoring the fact that it’s easier to get a PE paper than an RHCE)— no it’s an unfortunately named certification lacking which just precludes you from certain jobs requiring a PE.

The whole 8 hour exam in under 3 hours?

Don’t undersell it either. The minimum, as you pointed out, is safe. Your capitalization implies “it’s barely acceptable” and any engineer that has passed those tests would know this.

It indicates they're not some random. (Or someone without conventional engineering education.) I guess an undergrad degree, a few years of experience, and the ability to pass an academic test does indicate at least some basic background but probably not a whole lot more.

My capitalization means exactly what it says: someone with a license has met the minimum requirements from the state. Nothing else can be garnered from someone possessing a license.

The minimum requirements have, historically, resulted in engineers who put out public facing designs that, more often than not, do not bring harm to the public.

As someone who “has passed those tests” and been practicing for almost a decade, I can tell you first hand that sometimes the guy with a license who is actually at “the minimum” does not always put out something that is safe.

There's no need to put emphasis on it - unless your real motivation was to suggest the test is a joke. Which your claim to have been drunk and finished in nearly a third of the suggested time also implies.

Congratulations on taking it 3 hours drunk and passing. That is quite a feat depending on which particular test you took.

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