Truth to be told, Engineering license requirements have a bigger effect in gate keeping the profession and keep supply restricted, much like any other regulated profession. Gate keeping has some benefits, but is easily circumvented by bad actors all the time, such as all the sham degrees that just churn out the bare minimum to pass licensing tests.

If all the licensing to architects, doctors, engineers, lawyers, and so on, really had a big impact on quality, the world we live in would be very different and better. But that doesn't happen because licensing a profession only works if quality is upheld on all steps of the professional education chain.

A lot of software companies circumvent all of these downsides of bad quality in education by raising the bar on the hiring pipeline with a bunch of tests and so on. Does it always work? No, just like licensing doesn't. But at least it keep la the profession accessible to those who are willing to study algorithms, data structures and so on.

There's no perfect system in our world, but I am glad we don't have license requirements to develop software. I am a statistician that became a dev through self studying, training and learning on the job, and I also know many others (even real engineers) that turned to this profession without graduating in the field and contribute a ton with their specific background knowledge.

Should everyone be called engineers? Probably not as it will elude to licensing the profession, but not calling yourself one decreases chances of finding another job dramatically.

A true tragedy tbh, I'd rather if everyone called themselves devs, scientists or something less loaded than engineer.

>Gate keeping has some benefits, but is easily circumvented by bad actors all the time, such as all the sham degrees that just churn out the bare minimum to pass licensing tests.

Depends on the country and the educational system. In some countries no such sham degree is possible to be accepted for an engineering title.

I have yet to see a country where licensing equates to high quality in all the services. The examples I've used might not work in some places, but people find flaws in licensing systems all the time.

Sometimes licensing is so strict that things get done anyways ignoring license requirements because there is way more demand for some services than the supply of licensed professionals. In such cases, there are so many people violating regulation that policing becomes ineffective. It's the case with some Latin American countries.

And then you get to the problem that the license is ineffective and doesn't add to anything.

There's no perfect system to uphold quality of labor across a profession, we pick our poison and deal with it.

Good points. OP is arguing for regulations. Regulations failed egregiously all over in the Turkey earthquake and illustrate that they are not a silver bullet.

Setting a minimum threshold for competence makes sense, but when it becomes encoded into a legal system the result frequently becomes a way to enrich incumbents.