In the end, the courts ruled in his favour. As a matter of freedom of expression, anyone can now claim to be an engineer in the state of Oregon.

If they were actually going out and enforcing that law generally, then it would have been reasonable. Maybe it would be a stupid law, but they'd be even-handed about it.

But, there's like, a ton of people you can find in five minutes on LinkedIn who are using "engineer" in the same way. They could have easily cracked down on that.

Instead, they leave the law mostly unenforced, and then throw the book at you the moment you make the government look bad with a well-documented study of traffic lights. What a crock. That's a blatant abuse of power.

The Engineer license came up particularly to address quality control in civil engineering works [1]. So it's actually important to protect that, lest a bunch of folks start deciding they're qualified to give opinions on complicated structures or earthworks.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_en...

That’s a licensed position when you’re providing services to the public.

I think we’re desensitized by the software industry’s tendency to use the term for developers and technicians. “Software engineer” is not the same thing as an Engineer in the civil or electrical trade, for example.

This isn't anywhere near the same thing as "Software Engineer"

The public are not experts on all things. Someone ignorant to the stages of licensing are likely to hear "I studied engineering and work as an engineer" and think, "I can trust this person with topics related to engineering." This used to happen, to undesirable effect, which is why calling yourself "an engineer" especially in civil engineering fields requires a license.

Regulated professionals, by contrast, are often limited by law from disclaiming liability or otherwise shielding themselves from liability (e.g. by using a corporation). This is especially true for highly regarded professions like lawyers and doctors. Professionals and licensed workers more generally are also usually required to be bonded or carry insurance so that they're not judgment proof.[1]

[1] The reason you would rarely see a software engineer employee (or any employee) sued for negligence is that it would be a waste of money--they wouldn't be able to to pay a judgment. You sue the employer not because the employee isn't liable, but because 1) it's easier to prove a case against an employer and 2) the employer is the only one able to afford a judgment. For example, if a UPS truck driver runs you over, you always sue UPS. You may or not may not sue the truck driver, but unless the truck driver is secretly rich it's UPS you're expecting to pay out.

"You can be wrong half the time and still have a job" har har har

Here's [1] an example of the Board pursuing a company and their Professional Enigneers for an org structure that facilitated signing off of engineering work without satisfying the 'direct supervision' clause of the act. Specifically, the guy signing it off was based about 1500 km away from the team doing the work, and the head of the team doing the work, who was in reality supervising it, was not qualified to do so as a Professional Engineer.

As a second example, the coroner's investigation into the Dreamworld fatalities from a few years ago came out just last week [2,3]. In it the coroner recommended that the Board of Professional Engineers investigate the engineering firm that signed off the certification for the ride, over potential gross failures of practicing with due diligence. This may result in the approving Professional Engineer having their license to practice revoked.

[1]: https://www.queenslandjudgments.com.au/case/id/76335

[2]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-24/dreamworld-accident-i...

[3]: https://www.smh.com.au/national/queensland/dreamworld-inques...

[1]: https://www.oregon.gov/osbeels/rulesstatutes/Pages/Disciplin... [2] https://www.oregon.gov/osbeels/Documents/FinalOrders/2019111... [3] https://www.oregon.gov/osbeels/Documents/FinalOrders/2019071...

Remember, the original system was caused by "experts" in the area, whose authority far exceeded the person claiming the system incorrect.

Using authority as a measure would have lead to continued failure. It is always an error to use authority as proof.

I can sort of see the intention behind laws like this, but I also think it's a bit of gatekeeping. The original intention was to prevent someone who isn't licensed from providing professional opinions and from signing plans without also being accountable/responsible for the outcomes.

This is all well and good, except there are many engineering disciplines (outside of civil, mechanical, electrical... and even within them) where signing plans and providing professional-grade opinions are not the norm. My father was a practicing engineer for 30 years and has never had to sign a single plan, and so has never taken a licensing exam.

A licensed engineer typically has an additional P.Eng. or P.E. title (Professional Engineer), and I agree that that title should be regulated like all other licensing titles. But the word "engineer" is so generic that it doesn't really make sense to try to legally protect it.

Edit: According to wikipedia, there are plenty of titles in Canada like locomotive engineer used by a train operator even though the position is unrelated to the Professional Engineer license [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_en...

That part you cited in wikipedia has no citations and may not be legally correct. This is something that is codified in Ontario law [1] (not sure about other provinces, but I believe it is harmonized federally -- in Quebec the title ingenieur/engineer is protected.). This law has been tested several times (example in [2]). More info here [3]. Even Microsoft had to give up the use of the term "engineer" in Canada after being hit with lawsuits [4].

[1] https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90p28#BK43

[2] https://www.peo.on.ca/engineering-licensing-body-clarifies-u...

[3] https://engineerscanada.ca/frequently-asked-questions

[4] https://www.canadianconsultingengineer.com/engineering/micro...

also 4 is directly relating to training certs for a "systems engineer" not job titles which does make some sense, microsoft still seems to use the title "software engineer" in canada for jobs

(1-3 are not what i would consider unbiased sources)

People who have even grad degrees in some branch of engineering and have been working in the field for decades. But simply have never had a reason to get a PE? Perfectly reasonable for them to describe themselves as engineers (but not, of course, as PEs).

You can't logically have one without the other. If he claimed to be an engineer (which he acknowledges) and the state claims the title for licensing (which it did) then you can't enforce that licensing without some sort of penalty.

http://htor.inf.ethz.ch/blog/index.php/2008/11/06/you-can-al... quotes a Washington Post piece:

> At least seven U.S. citizens working as researchers in Germany have faced criminal probes in recent months for using the title “Dr.” on their business cards, Web sites and resumes. They all hold doctoral degrees from elite universities back home

A NZ PhD holder in Germany could get in legal trouble until at 2012 - http://www.stuff.co.nz/editors-picks/6783089/Germany-goes-fo... .

There is a vast gulf between stating one is an engineer, which many people are, and that one is a PE.

Reminds me of zero tolerance rules at schools, where adults claim that they can't understand the difference between two very different things.

You're just letting your pet peeves color your perceptions. I'm not backing anything here, I'm pointing out that if you're licensing the title of engineer then it makes sense to protect that license and therefore penalise people claiming the title without being licensed.

> There is a vast gulf between stating one is an engineer […] and that one is a PE.

In Oregon, before this lawsuit, there was not.

> Reminds me of zero tolerance rules at schools, where adults claim that they can't understand the difference between two very different things.

Yes, your comment also reminds me of people refusing to understand basic concepts.

It's a bad position and this case is an example of why it's a bad position.

You stated that "If he claimed to be an engineer (which he acknowledges) and the state claims the title for licensing (which it did) then you can't enforce that licensing without some sort of penalty."

Of course you can. He didn't build bridges for pay, which is the type of engineering the law is clearly about. He just stated that he was an "engineer".

But yes, I'm the simplistic thinker, for pointing out that shades of gray exist in your black and white definition of things.

Planes don't stay in the sky, money didn't arrive in a bank account, technocratic administration of the government didn't continue another day, email didn't continue to hit inboxes, phones didn't continue to work, etc etc etc, just because amateurs got improbably lucky again today.

Our field has its challenges, but given the number of people who didn't die today because it succeeds the overwhelming majority of the time, it doesn't make sense to diminish the people addressing those challenges by deprofessionalizing them. Additionally, the practical impact of deprofessionalization would be "Software can't be trusted to the geeks. Let's give it to competent professionals, like the executive branch of the government. We have replete evidence they'll do a better job, mostly via writing requirements documents to give to Raytheon."

A quickly following second order effect of licensing engineers will be an extremely predictable one-two punch of a) differing career paths for licensed engineers and commodity code-monkeys and b) demographic differences in entrants into those two pools along axes that you will probably care about.

All it takes is one tick box requirement in federal contracting templates ("Vendor certifies that all engineers working on this system and subcomponents are duly licensed") to infect AppAmaGooBookSoft's HR policies. AppAmaGooBookSoft will institutionally love that requirement; people who care about the future composition of the industry's hiring pool should not.

We'll get to exchange being plausibly the most accessible white collar profession in the US for one which will be aggressively and formally policed at the point of entry by the same sort of folks who convince e.g. the ACM to advocate for immigration restrictions. Many folks are annoyed at the extent to which individual engineers engage in gatekeeping behavior. Few would consciously choose to advocate adding professional gatekeepers who have quarterly targets for gatekeeping productivity. That's not an incidental effect of a licensing regime. It is what licensing means.

I know you don't particularly like CATO, but CATO will win the argument about what will happen under a licensing regime by an overwhelming margin and, even taking into account you and CATO have very different values, you would hate the downstream impacts of that policy.

(This is perhaps a lot of effort for a lowbrow dismissal that was probably more intended to vent than be a policy proposal but this particular one is a 20 year hobbyhorse of mine. Our desired regulatory stance as a profession is not consequence-free; if we'd actually want a licensing regime, it should be because we've done the math and are willing to accept the consequences. If not, we should loudly and specifically reject the characterization that we're not equivalent to licensed professionals.)

I'd like to give you a dozen paragraphs in response to your rebuttal, but unfortunately I don't need them to refute you. All I have to say is "none of this makes what we do engineering".

We are not engineers. We have none of the guardrails serious engineering has. We normally make decisions in an almost complete absence of consideration for safety, reliability, and security. Buildings erected millennia ago stand today, doing what buildings generally do, and even throughout the worst of the industrial disasters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, buildings generally managed to keep themselves upright. Nobody suggests that civil and mechanical and structural engineering haven't progressed since then, didn't address vital safety problems, and didn't formalize their respective disciplines. They obviously did. But that's essentially the claim you're making about software. Just because planes don't routinely fall out of the sky doesn't mean we're not in the Triangle Shirtwaist era of software development

I don't actually disagree with your general point. But there are plenty of examples of civil engineering project failures because of defective materials and the like and there are established practices in many areas of software.

I've worked in engineering outside of software--and was even on track to get a PE--and a lot of that was pretty ad hoc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22315607

(I hadn't read about the KC Hyatt disaster before).

OTOH, Heartbleed had as much to do with critical open source code being maintained by someone who was basically doing on a shoestring via donations as a lack of software engineering processes in general.

I'm not even saying things must necessarily change. I'm just making the case that what we're doing isn't engineering.

Successfully doing that is a lot, lot more than being just a software "developer".

I realise the purpose of the lights is to keep the intersection clear for the flow of traffic that has the green light, but in real life traffic situations, things rarely work out that way and some common sense is always needed.

In both states, you are supposed to not enter the intersection unless you have both time and space to make it through. In Oregon, intersections tend to stay clear more, because people generally follow that rule more. In California, if the light is yellow and traffic is stopped on the other side, many people will enter anyway, knowing they can't go through, just to claim their "turn". And totally block traffic when the light changes. Not so much in Oregon.

"GHM’s solution to regulate a yellow change interval first appeared in the 1965 ITE Traffic Engineering Handbook, and it has become known as the kinematic equation. However, GHM’s solution is limited to vehicles traveling through level intersections at constant velocity, which does not include vehicle deceleration to execute safe turning maneuvers. This article presents a brief review covering GHM’s original solution and Mats Järlström’s extended kinematic equation which allows for vehicle deceleration and turning maneuvers."

Solution? Yellow means stop. If you run a yellow it’s the same as running a red.

You can only run a yellow if you’re already in the intersection when the light turns.

Despite the groaning and complaints from motorists, pedestrian impacts and high speed intersection collisions have dropped dramatically.

Imagine you're going 20mph/30kmh and the light turns yellow when you're 1 meter away from entering the intersection. If you try to stop, you'll end up stopped in the middle of the intersection.

If your response is "in that case just keep going to clear the intersection"... That's exactly what the existing yellow light law is here that is being debated in the OP.

That is my response indeed.

The problem arises when you treat yellows as "clear the intersection" and you get people stepping on the gas who are 100m from the intersection. This often leads to high speed collisions and pedestrian fatalities because you now have a car that instead of just rolling through a red, is absolutely blasting through.

Or at least blasting through a yellow.

I see this scenario in SF all the time. Car driving 25mph, sees light turn yellow, speeds up to 50mph to make the light. Could've stopped in time if they treated yellow as "stop".

This is obviously dangerous, but totally legal under "you can ride through yellow" laws as the car did in fact clear the intersection before the light turned red.

If you're in stopping distance and the light changes to STOP, then you STOP, no matter whether stop is encoded as red or yellow or both. So you don't need yellow for that, you can just give them red. They will stop.

If you're not in stopping distance and you get a sudden STOP sign, whether that's red or yellow, well you're kinda fucked because you're going to end up in the intersection anyway.

I don't see any rationale for having yellow with these rules (except to indicate that the light is about to turn from red to green).

- Traffic violation if you enter the intersection when the light is RED.

- Traffic violation if your speed increases at all when the light is YELLOW.

- Yellow light must last at least Ty = A * L + T where: L is the posted speed limit, A is a accelleration that lawmaker must be exposed to 100 1-5sec intervals of annually before renewing the law establishing values for A and T for that year, and T is a reaction time that lawmakers must consistently (ie 100/100 tests) be able to meet (also annually).

If yellow means “STOP but grace period if you cant” it removes the incentive to accelerate

The purpose of yellow, with a decent interval, is to make it possible to stop on a red, provided a vehicle is in good condition and not egregiously speeding, and the driver is sober and alert

Word semantic games about how that is expressed in the language of the traffic code do not change how it works.

"STOP but grace if you can't" wording makes it appear as if under some circumstances, it is a violation to enter the intersection on yellow. It creates incentive for police to bust people who go through yellow lights, on the premise that the judgment of what is an acceptable way to proceed through a yellow light is some objective standard that can be accurately policed.

I got a yellow light ticket by a cop who went through the same light, some 15-20 meters behind me! I remember thinking, "I was totally okay, but that driver behind me was pretty late; was it still even yellow?" Then that car put on police flashers.

I took it to court and prepared the defense that, if a vehicle A has time to stop on the yellow, then any vehicle B that is behind it must have even more time to stop. If the driver of B judges that he has no time to stop and proceeds, but claims that A ahead of him had plenty of time to stop, that is an inconsistent, double standard. (Actually, that was my back-up argument; my main argument was that I didn't want to be rear-ended by the car behind me, which clearly intended to proceed. And I would call as the witness the driver of that car who happened to be fortuitously present in the courtroom.)

I never got to present my argument, because that officer testified as having no evidence, so the case was dropped.

Anyway, sure, people will only change their behavior, but only due to being worried for being ticketed for going through a yellow in a manner that some officer doesn't like.

Here is a thought: if you are certain you do not have time to stop, and you're below the legal speed limit, why shouldn't you accelerate, if you feel like it? Say I'm doing 35 km/h in a 50 km/h zone (maybe I just left a parking spot, or turned a corner), and I'm 1 meter from the intersection which is green. It turns yellow. Why wouldn't I accelerate, or continue accelerating? Accelerating, by itself, doesn't prove that you had time to stop.

The problem is your previous statement implies that if you are going 45mph and the light turns yellow when you are 5 ft away from entering the intersection, you are required to stop. The physics doesn't work.