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Comment by ifwinterco | Hacker News Reader

It is a protected title in some countries but not the UK (and I don’t think the US either?).

I believe in some European countries you’re not allowed to call yourself any kind of “Engineer” without being a member of a professional body?

So ironically if that was the case Margaret Hamilton would not have been allowed to coin the term

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It is not a protected title in the U.S., China, or India, and yet you could say those are three countries most responsible for writing the software that the rest of the world uses. I would argue there is some connection.

It is easy to see how gatekeeping is particularly valuable for those with the means to distinguish themselves. But for the rest of us, people who want to work on or consume a product, does a field benefit more from having an open gate or closed?

The use of engineer as a title is endemic in some industries that don’t involve software. A mechanical superintendent at a drilling company I worked for like to refer to (drilling) mud “engineers” as mud salesmen because they were always trying to sell you more product.

If the title is backed by professional standards, standards by which someone can lose the title and be held legally liable, then I can see the gatekeeping as valuable. If it is used to restrict who can write software, then I would see it as detrimental.

That seems like the best way to parse the issue. To push back on my earlier point, some kind of standards enforcing mechanism doesn't have to be exclusionary as long as the path to earning the credential is open to everyone. It is probably more important now than it has ever been, since anyone can produce code now without understanding it.

> I don’t think the US either?

"Engineer" isn't in the US. P.E is.

You only need a P.E license if you are going to perform certain specific tasks. For example, in some jurisdiction, plans for a building above a certain height or floor size must be signed by a licensed P.E.

Not all engineering disciplines are covered by a P.E exam.

> I believe in some European countries you’re not allowed to call yourself any kind of “Engineer” without being a member of a professional body? > So ironically if that was the case Margaret Hamilton would not have been allowed to coin the term

Had she been in Europe, she would not have been a part of the Apollo project, something so cutting edge it required new disciplines to be invented like Software Engineering, for the term to be coined in the first place.

In France it's not about being a member of a professional body, but you need to have an engineer degree to be called an engineer.

It's a master's degree but not all masters are engineer degrees. It's from the "Grandes Ecoles".

And yes, most software engineers in France have an engineer degree.

I believe it is protected in some states. https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-li...

PE is protected in most states, "Engineer" isn't.

That's what the Oregon case was about.

It is protected in Canada as well.

In Canada, I was once hired as a Data Engineering Specialist because they couldn't use the term Data Engineer.

The college course I did was Software Engineering Technology because they could not use Software Engineering.

Engineering courses are regulated and regularly audited because engineering programs are accredited.

One of the requirements to become licensed (if one desires to) is to graduate from an accredited programs.

Several programs have been accredited for software engineering for 20+ years now.

https://engineerscanada.ca/accreditation/accredited-programs...

The UK does have professional bodies and memberships of those but the terms are more specific, such as "Chartered Engineer".

Well, there couldn't be a school to become a software engineer if she was the one coining the term.

At the time it was mostly hardware engineers who did this, along with people with math background (especially discreete math). Most of the cutting edge applications for computers were in numerical simulation for engineering, so most software engineers would have been electrical/electronics engineers.

There have been accredited Software Engineering programs in Canada for more than 20 years now.

https://engineerscanada.ca/accreditation/accredited-programs...

How useful is that to this woman who would have needed one in 1950?

True, I'll edit the first part of my comment

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