In Canada the engineering associations are self regulating bodies, that is, the associations serve a legal purpose because of the technical nature of engineering. The thinking is that Politicians don't have the technical background to regulate the profession and so having pronvincial bodies allows engineers to regulate themselves. Hence the ethics part
The value of the system shows up in things like civil engineering when it is required that an accredited engineer signs off on the design. That engineer has personal liability if the building fails. The engineer's boss cannot simply order the engineer to sign off on the design, if the engineer says that you must, it has real weight.
The US has the same basic system, all that is different is how strictly the word "engineer" is regulated. And that varies by state.
Before that system was adopted, bridges fell down an average of once a week in the USA. We have a lot more and bigger bridges now, but not nearly as many fall down.
Read https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Software-Development-Sch... for case for doing the same thing for software development.
Re:Why Ageism Never Gets Old
by humanrebar on Thursday November 16, 2017 @09:20AM
(#15712749)
> Sounds like a racket, especially given that the PEO is a private organization.
Dunno why you need the qualifier there. There are public and nonprofit rackets, too.
You can become a software PE in the United States, but it is absolutely a racket. One of the requirements for a PE is you need to work for another PE. This leads to a situation where new exams, like the software discipline, have 20 people sit for an exam in one year. The transportation discipline had 1,800.
Re:Why Ageism Never Gets Old
by Harvey-Specter on Thursday November 16, 2017 @09:00AM
(#15712634)
> One of the requirements for a PE is you need to work for another PE.
That's also a requirement in Canada (Ontario at least). Work experience has to be completed while working under a P.Eng.
Sounds like a racket, especially given that the PEO is a private organization. I’m not sure why this is supposed to be a good thing.
> Everyone who graduates from an accredited engineering program in Canada has to take an ethics course and has these rules drilled into their heads.
It bothers me that people believe that A) ethics can be taught like any other engineering class and B) ethics should be prescribed by some professional association.
> But then I graduated and half the people I run in to at hackathons and conferences did a two week bootcamp
I agree this is a problem, but most of the actual engineers I meet in real life (i.e. people who did a 4-or-more year accredited engineering program, including some who are from Canada) don’t actually have a particularly impressive level of rigor that would set them apart from most of the college-educated programmers I meet.