I was curious about your background and you don't have a profile summary so I looked at your brief comment history

From a few days back:

>Back in Web 1.0 (1999 or so) I worked for what was then a large Social Network. There was no security. Any engineer could look at anything.

I'm assuming you weren't using the word engineer there to refer to Professional Engineers?

The original meaning of engineer was: "A constructor of military engines; a person who designs and constructs military works for attack and defence."

It is first found in English in 1380, when I doubt any professional certification bodies existed.

Eventually it evolved to mean what you got your license in, and then evolved further to include things like "software engineers".

Unless you build engines, the word engineer to describe what you do is etymologically inaccurate. So why is your particular stage on the path of organic evolution of this word more valid than anyone else's?

Because PEs have a legal definition under the law.

That's true, which is why you wouldn't put P.E. after your name or represent yourself as a Mechanical Engineer etc... No one who knows what a PE is going to be confused by someone calling themselves a software engineer, and audio engineer, or a sanitation engineer.

I understand the other argument that the job title "Engineer" is being diluted, but that ship sailed a long time ago. There are way more people with engineer in their title than there are PEs so I doubt any widespread legislative attempt to change this would be successful. And it's not just software engineers. Plenty of people working as engineers with ABET accredited engineering degrees haven't passed the PE exam either.

Because I have a state licence from a previous life as an EE.

Did your state exist in 1380?

It's not possible to actually become a licensed/professional software engineer as of April this year, at least in Florida. Florida requires that you pass the NCEES PE exam - not sure if there are other exam vendors used elsewhere in the US - and NCEES elected to stop offering the software engineer exam citing low demand:

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

It was only ever administered 6 times.

I've spent all of 30 minutes studying this, so, hardly an expert. But it seems like the genesis and ongoing purpose of P.E. accreditation is to protect the health and safety of the public. There have certainly been some high profile examples of poor software engineering affecting health and safety - thinking about the Toyota acceleration issue and the VW emissions scandal - but I am wondering if people really think an accreditation body would prevent this sort of thing from happening. What would a Professional Software Engineer be, and why would they be inherently better or more qualified than what we have today?

> It's not possible to actually become a licensed/professional software engineer as of April this year, at least in Florida. Florida requires that you pass the NCEES PE exam - not sure if there are other exam vendors used elsewhere in the US - and NCEES elected to stop offering the software engineer exam citing low demand...

There's no demand because they made the process more or less impossible for developers to ever get to to the point where they take the PE exam.

First, the candidate has to pass one of the Fundamentals of Engineering exam to become an engineer-in-training. Except, whoops, there isn't a software specific FE; the most relevant one is the EE/Comp. E. exam. Take a look at the list of topics: https://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/FE-Ele-CBT-specs.pdf Most developers aren't going to pass that even with a CS degree.

Secondly, you need 4-8 years of supervision by a licensed engineer. Again, whoops, there are barely any software developers with a PE license, so who would they get to supervise them?

Frankly, the situation was so absurd that one has to suspect that NCEES didn't want to certify software developers as PEs.

You can't really use engineering methodologies to guarantee public safety from software. Engineering wants to model behavior and add margin on the worst case scenario to make failure unlikely.

Provably correct software development is too slow and specialized to be economically feasible. Even formal correctness is not enough, you also need to defend against unpredictable hardware faults. No traditional engineering discipline needs to do this.

I disagree. An engineer is someone who applies a science to build a solution (aka a product). Mechanical/Electrical/Nuclear engineering is applied physics. Petrol/Chemical engineering is applied chemistry. Pharmaceuticals are applied biology. And finally, Software engineering is applied Computer Science.