To me, PE means either pulmonary embolism or private equity (and I have a hard time trying to decide with one I'd rather have to deal with). Which is to say there are too many initialisms these days and I have no idea what you mean even in context, and I wish people would take the time to write out words.

PE is a long-standing title for a professional engineer which requires time on the job and another rigorous test and is common vernacular if you ever intersected with an engineering school or department in college or worked with an engineer in a professional capacity. And software “engineering” doesn’t count.

Would you expect MD or CPA to be spelled out every time?

Perhaps, but would you expect the general public to know what the initialism CCIE is, for instance? And when you say Professional Engineer, I assume it's not the kind of engineer who drives trains correct? Though I believe that is the original meaning of the word. But probably also not the kind of engineer who writes software?

I mean, using a search engine to figure out what a CCIE was took about 10 seconds. Searching "engineer pe" and finding a contextually relevant answer wasn't any harder. Not every comment, article or book must devolve to serve the greatest common denominator.

Well, when you know one of the words in a two word initialism, I suspect it helps the search engine quite a bit.

> Well, when you know one of the words in a two word initialism, I suspect it helps the search engine quite a bit.

"Most working engineers don’t even bother with a PE."

Engineer is right there, no need for you know the E of PE is for engineer.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=working+engineers+PE

https://search.brave.com/search?q=working+engineer+PE

https://www.google.com/search?q=working+engineer+PE

You are giving off troll vibes. Maybe you are in the wrong forum? HN has been called all sorts of things but never a "general public" forum. Next time, just ask if you don't know - no shame in that.

"Most working engineers don’t even bother with a Professional Engineer" doesn't really sound like a reasonable utterance unless you already know what you're trying to say.

Professional Engineer license

I understand, but it also shows your (in)competence.