It might not be like this everywhere, but in the US all software engineers are self-labelled. It's not like medical doctor (MD) or professional engineer (PE) where the title actually implies some license to practice.
But virtually nobody does it. The NCEES even abandoned their Software Engineer licensing exam a few years ago because nobody was taking it.
Last time I looked, I couldn't find any. Some states tried for a while, but I think they all gave up.
You can be fined really high if you hire a self-called engineer without a proper degree. Or at least decades of alleged experience in the field.
Personally, I like „software engineering“ as it is — being a free profession where talent counts more than a degree.
FTFY.
Cynically, Me.
Are you saying for MD or PE that talent doesn't matter?
Anybody can say they are a software engineer. The title means nothing.
Some people go to places where their low talent but high cash flow allows them to get a license.
MD at least means something. "Software engineer" means nothing.
They both mean something. You have to dive in to get the real scope regardless. If you just need a title for your commerical MD would carry more weight around diet products and a developer around a new software offering.
You are not required to do the exam, provided there is no civil liability or signing projects as the legally responsible Software/Informatics Engineering.
Good luck with that here.
That's not the standard for any kind of engineering. Professional Engineers make errors all the time. But they also design systems with fail safes, redundancies, safety factors, etc... You design systems with the expectation that failures will happen. Users will do stupid things. Highly improbably sequences will probably happen.
Not all code needs to be designed so carefully. Nobody cares if Hacker News is offline for a few hours. But the software systems in self driving cars or running an MRI machine probably should be designed by licensed professionals who can stand up to their bosses and say "this can't ship until these improvements are made" because if it does ship, they can be personally sued for malpractice and lose their license.
Even the cook at the bistro on the corner is liable if the food, cleaning or refrigeration isn't as it is supposed to be
One more case of mistakenly presenting 'Europe' as an homogenous entity, whereas it depends on countries like anywhere else.
In France anyone can claim an engineer position, it is not licensed. You just cannot tell you hold an engineer degree if you haven't one; and that's pretty theoretical, because basically nobody uses the proper formal title (unlike for example in Germany where they always use the words Dipl. Ing.), so you can always fall back on claiming you are talking about the position and not the degree title.
In the US we don't really have licensing for engineers (there is PE, but it's not anything close to ubiquitous). I think it's one of the best parts of our engineering/tech culture.
You're an engineer based on the skills you employ to solve the problems you do, not because some body of people gave you a slip of paper that says you can employ those skills to solve those problems.
A big difference is whether or not this is well recognized, and by whom and/or at their own peril.
In programming you can learn your way to advanced skills while getting paid. Once you know roughly one class worth of basics there's valuable contributions you can make, at least if you are decent at figuring things out on a computer.
* Engineers (and operated trains) * Manufacturing Engineers (who were really equipment techs) * Sanitary Engineers (who were really trash truck drivers) * UX Engineers (who were really web designers) * Software engineers (programmers) * Data Engineers (kind of dba-ish, maybe) * Culinary Engineer (restaurant kitchen designer)
Genericide has occurred. The boat sailed.
When the real estate industry wanted a word for "licensed seller of property" they had to make up a new word "Realtor" and protect that with a certification mark. The engineering industry really needs to do the same thing instead of harrassing the garbage truck driver, computer programmers and the guy who fixes the conveyor belt.
https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-li...
TL;DR: such restrictions violate your freedom of speech.
For example, the software for self-driving cars should be signed off by a licensed engineer before it is allowed to go live. Many mechanical and electrical parts of the car have been designed by licensed professionals, why not the software?
I don't think the same is true for software "engineering," as it seems that all possible forms of process can be subverted and cargo-culted, from agile methods down to code checking. Certainly there is room to remedy some shortcomings, but SWE definitely is the engineering discipline least based in physical fact.
The physics behind simulating the buckling of a structure is always the same, we can just choose more or less crude approximations of it, but SWE in general seems a lot more diverse. I can implement that simulation in assembly or some scripting language, and attach various bits and pieces to it to manage users and data; deploy it across the cloud if need be. But, there isn't a singular, time-invariant optimal path to achieving that, and what is true today may not be true tomorrow. One can work off basic principles, like the Agile Manifesto, but how can you quantify or even certify this shifting landscape?
The _physics_ of a buckling structure may be always the same. But already the modelling techniques are far from obvious consensus: Do you do it analytically? Do you use FEM? BEM? Then there are a bunch of simulation techniques, i.e. for numerical integration, which you could use, much like you could use functional or imperative programming or OOP or whatever else.
So if we were to behave more like the _software_ branch of the engineering discipline in general, then we'd have a _much_ tighter space of languages that would be at all acceptable for any work deemed critical, like medical, administrative or aeronautical software.
For example, a memory allocator can be studied in the usual algorithmic sense or perhaps how they impact the stability of the system under randomized load. Can you prove the system remains stable? Yeah. Is it worth it when you can reboot machines and add some heuristics? No.
Currently, the big places which are getting any attention for verification of functionality are embedded applications and OS kernels. Even then, the depth of verification is limited to common bug categories.
Maybe some companies have some internal requirement for that, but generally speaking that's not true. Legal requirements for review and approval by a PE only apply to building drawings.
I'm rooting for the same, finally we will earn like management /s
The differentiation I was trying to draw with those two words is: I don't know if they're actually working software developers or people who just hack on code in their free time. If they're professional devs, that's obviously much worse.
Honestly, not the part of that I was expecting to have to discuss.
The term developer doesn't require a license neither does CEO or board member or president of the US.