Hacker News Reader

Comment by anemoiac | Hacker News Reader

Why not? In the US, there isn’t a formal professional engineer (P.E.) certification for software engineers (unlike most other branches of engineering). If you’re performing the same job as someone who has a software engineering or comp sci degree and your job title happens to be “software engineer,” why would it matter if you have an unrelated degree, no degree, or even no high school diploma?

*This may not be true outside of the US

View on HN

In Texas, the roster lists 60 professional engineers who hold active licenses with “Software” as one of the branches. I expect some of these individuals took and passed the NCEES exam in software engineering, which was offered from 2013 until 2019, when it was discontinued due to low interest:

https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineerin...

I imagine the individuals who obtained these licenses did so for prestige or credibility, to support the idea of licensing for software engineers, or because their work is related to other, more closely regulated engineering disciplines.

Some states try to control the use of “engineer” as a title, at least in some contexts, but I don’t know of any U.S. state that regulates the practice of software engineering, as such, nor of any credible plans to change this.

In Canada, you can't call yourself an engineer unless you are a P.Eng.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com