At least for mechanical, it's 4 years' working experience, documentation of sufficiently advanced projects, and sign-off from 3 other registered professional engineers who are familiar with your work.
A guy I worked with took the mechanical design variant. I don't know how the HVAC variant is. The test is over the most advanced stuff you learn in your degree; the "specialist" portion of the test (what your concentration is in, e.g., HVAC, thermal/fluids, or machine design and materials) is ~25 questions and you have 4 hours to complete it, in addition to the other 4 hour comprehensive portion that's the same for all takers.
On top of that, to keep your license, you need to complete some amount of classroom education every year.
As far as coursework goes, the coursework for some of my upper-level mech E classes was usually identical to a graduate-level course, the only difference being graduate students do a research paper+experiment for a final exam and undergrads do a traditional written exam since they had access to funding and we did not.
imo this comment is dismissive and glosses way too heavily over the rigor that goes into even the "lowliest" of engineering programs.
In Florida, the title of "software engineer" requires a license. To obtain the license, you only need to pass the national engineering (I forgot the exact name of the organization) exam for software engineering. The national exam was withdrawn some years ago. I wrote the Florida Engineering Board about it, suggesting that they needed to update the requirements.
Their response? Florida doesn't distinguish between PE specialties; prospective software engineers should just get a PE license in another field. They suggested electrical engineering.
So in Florida, the PE signing off on your buildings's wiring might be a chemist, or the PE supervising a bridge construction might be only trained in electrical engineering.
Also, if (in Texas) you stamp something outside of your area of expertise and it comes up in a review, it's viewed as if you never had the stamp in the first place[1]
[0]: https://ncees.org/exams/pe-exam/
[1]: https://pels.texas.gov/downloads/lawrules.pdf - rules 133.97(b) and 137.59(b)
My _literal_ engineering 101 case studies on "engineering failure":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge
Are all failures traced down to the underlying design and engineering. Granted, they are famous because they are rare. I almost linked the Columbia disaster but that is sufficiently murky between engineer and management.
Stop being elitist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_International_Universi...
Btw, the cult of the professional engineer is apparently much stronger in Canada, to the point I've actually impressed women by calling myself a software engineer despite the lack of iron ring. I wonder if this makes up for them being paid peanuts?
I realize that HN has many actual software engineers, but it seems like every frontend dev today calls himself an engineer. Even on the Laravel website, the default job title for new members is software engineer.
I remember seeing technician jobs for programmers (not "developers"). The difference was that engineers were expected to have a masters degree (5 years) while technicians were expected to have a associate degree (2 years). The contract also was different, usually with a fixed schedule and a lower pay excluding overtime, as any overtime was expected to be paid. But for the job itself, there was essentially no difference between a junior engineer and a technician. Now, listed technician jobs are becoming rare.
Note that it is in France, where degrees matter more than in the US and employment is more regulated, the distinction probably wouldn't be as meaningful in the US.
I honestly don't know if this is sarcastic or not...
It's pretty much how professional prestigious positions work. Beneath the gilding there's duct tape repaired with super glue.
*Edit: okay, I don't know exactly how many are officially PEs vs. junior engineers or something, but at least that many are "PE-track".
They are complaining that developers who can crank out garbage with no consequences and take home $200k+ aren't respected as much as civil engineers who have to get licences and suffer accountability and take home less.
The poor baby.
In 2005 the US said it was in the same condition as 75,000 other bridges in the US: 'structurally deficient', which is also what the US called it in 1990. I'd guess that the same quality of decisions brought down Arecibo. Gotta pay the piper.