Is a 'Software Engineer' An Engineer? Alberta Regulator Says No, Riling the Province's Tech Sector (theglobeandmail.com) 258
Alberta's engineering regulator is in a fight with the province's technology sector, insisting anyone with the title "software engineer" must hold a permit -- and pay fees for that right. The Globe and Mail reports: The Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA), has asked a court to order one of the province's leading software companies, Octopusapp, known as Jobber, to stop using the term "engineer" in job titles and postings unless it gets a permit from the regulator. That has caused an uproar in Alberta's tech sector. On Friday, the Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI) published an open letter signed by chief executive officers of 32 Alberta tech companies, including Jobber's Sam Pillar, calling on Premier Danielle Smith to stop "regulator overreach" by APEGA.
The letter says APEGA's "aggressive position" would result in "onerous, restrictive and unnecessary certification requirements" for developers, and harm companies' ability to compete for talent. "If we cannot effectively compete for the best employees while headquartered in Alberta, we must seriously consider whether this is a place where our companies can succeed,â states the letter signed by CEOs of Benevity, Symend, Neo Financial Technologies and others. CCI president Benjamin Bergen said he hoped Ms. Smith, who pledged to cut red tape while campaigning to lead the United Conservative Party, would take action "because this is really a red tape issue. It is the only jurisdiction globally that is pushing this. It's making Alberta uncompetitive in the tech sector."
APEGA and Canada's 11 other provincial and territorial engineering regulators have complained for years about companies or individuals who use the titles "software engineer" and "computer engineer," arguing they are prohibited from doing so. In July, Engineers Canada, which represents the regulators, issued a joint statement calling for individuals to be prohibited from using the offending titles unless they are licensed as engineers. "Professional engineers are held to high professional and ethical standards and work in the public interest," it said. "The public places a high degree of trust in the profession and these layers of accountability and transparency help keep Canadians safe." The regulators are mandated to enforce their relative statutes and have sporadically taken legal action to protect their turf. [...] Provincial and territorial laws regulating engineers vary. Alberta's Engineering and Geoscience Professions Act states no individual, corporation or partnership can use the word "engineer" in a job title unless they are "a professional engineer, licensee or permit holder entitled to engage in the practice of engineering." A spokesperson for Alberta labour minister Kaycee Madu said in an e-mail the government would work with the parties to resolve the issue, adding: "We are concerned by any regulations that impede our competitiveness in the world skilled-labour market."
Meanwhile, Erum Afsar, director of enforcement with APEGA, said in an interview: "What we are doing is regulating what the government has legislated us to do. If you're using that title, you should be registered with APEGA."
Further reading: Oregon Fines Man For Writing a Complaint Email Stating 'I Am An Engineer'
The letter says APEGA's "aggressive position" would result in "onerous, restrictive and unnecessary certification requirements" for developers, and harm companies' ability to compete for talent. "If we cannot effectively compete for the best employees while headquartered in Alberta, we must seriously consider whether this is a place where our companies can succeed,â states the letter signed by CEOs of Benevity, Symend, Neo Financial Technologies and others. CCI president Benjamin Bergen said he hoped Ms. Smith, who pledged to cut red tape while campaigning to lead the United Conservative Party, would take action "because this is really a red tape issue. It is the only jurisdiction globally that is pushing this. It's making Alberta uncompetitive in the tech sector."
APEGA and Canada's 11 other provincial and territorial engineering regulators have complained for years about companies or individuals who use the titles "software engineer" and "computer engineer," arguing they are prohibited from doing so. In July, Engineers Canada, which represents the regulators, issued a joint statement calling for individuals to be prohibited from using the offending titles unless they are licensed as engineers. "Professional engineers are held to high professional and ethical standards and work in the public interest," it said. "The public places a high degree of trust in the profession and these layers of accountability and transparency help keep Canadians safe." The regulators are mandated to enforce their relative statutes and have sporadically taken legal action to protect their turf. [...] Provincial and territorial laws regulating engineers vary. Alberta's Engineering and Geoscience Professions Act states no individual, corporation or partnership can use the word "engineer" in a job title unless they are "a professional engineer, licensee or permit holder entitled to engage in the practice of engineering." A spokesperson for Alberta labour minister Kaycee Madu said in an e-mail the government would work with the parties to resolve the issue, adding: "We are concerned by any regulations that impede our competitiveness in the world skilled-labour market."
Meanwhile, Erum Afsar, director of enforcement with APEGA, said in an interview: "What we are doing is regulating what the government has legislated us to do. If you're using that title, you should be registered with APEGA."
Further reading: Oregon Fines Man For Writing a Complaint Email Stating 'I Am An Engineer'
An Engineer can be sued. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:An Engineer can be sued. (Score:5, Informative)
Usually the differentiator is the term "Professional Engineer" (North America) or "Chartered Engineer" (UK) vs "engineer". In the UK anyone can call themselves an "engineer" and my experience back in the 80s was an engineer often held a wrench in greasy hands and was quite adept at kicking heavy metal obects.
Professional Engineers have to provide some proof of competence to hold the title and a P.Eng is required to sign off on certain things like bridge and building designs. This is generally a good thing and usually prevents shit from falling over randomly.
Problem with APEGA's point of view is that there are no Professional Engineering standards to meet in order to be called a Professional Software Engineer. There is no such thing as far as I know, although there has been a lot of hand wringing and fretful talk about developing something to protect the public from fly by night coders. Basically this means that APEGA is just in a territorial pissing match over the word "engineer".
I believe that in the UK they long ago determined that "engineer" is such a common word in the language that by itself the term could not be regulated.
APEGA should be limited to regulating the Professional level only and should do something useful instead of language policing IMHO.
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The core problem with that is you have then limited what you can be engineer of to what exams are available, limiting the utility of language.
That's exactly the reasoning behind it. You can only be an engineer of something that is clearly defined, mature, and where we have a common understanding of the requirements for both the product and the job. You can't just hand wave an engineering field out of thin air.
Until the field has settled, and there are several examples and some experience with it, there are standards to adhere to and known limits of applicability, you are an inventor, an experimenter or a tinkerer, but not an engineer. And yes,
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That's because in NZ 'engineer' is not a protected term, so everything you say is true culturally. Plenty of countries protect the term engineer the same way in NZ people cannot just claim to be a doctor or a lawyer.
I've personally never liked the term software engineer that much just because even very low skilled developers will still call themselves that, meaning the term becomes no different from programmer, even if no design or engineering is taking place.
The best compromise I think is kind of as you su
APEGA already lost a lawsuit about this (Score:2)
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I believe that in the UK they long ago determined that "engineer" is such a common word in the language that by itself the term could not be regulated.
Some other countries don't focus on the term as much as the activity. The question is: Is a Software Engineer, performing an engineering activity. In Queensland Australia the BPEQ define "Information Telecommunications and Electronics" a form of engineering, meaning that engaging in that activity requires you to be a registered professional engineer.
The rule is you can call yourself an engineer if you want, but if you engage in a certain activity then registration (or at least oversight from a registered pr
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I have never directed any trains. Choo! Choo! All aboard. I am the engineer!
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Many software companies provide disclaimers in the licensing of the software making it next to impossible to sue the company for just about anything serious.
But if the legislation is changed in a way that makes software companies responsible for data loss and damages then it can filter down to the engineers.
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Indeed. Although there are efforts in Europe to change that and they are sorely needed. Too much software is not even remotely conforming to the state-of-the-art. That includes stuff from really large vendors. It is high time to require software engineers to produce results that are worthy of being called engineered. And to make vendors that let unqualified personnel write software liable for any and all defects in there.
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Anyone can be sued for anything, and software engineers are not exempt.
If an engineer is an employee, the company will be sued, not the individual.
In an engineer is a contractor, the contractee can sue for failure to perform, including producing an unsafe design.
If an engineer is a PE, they may have additional liability.
Re:An Engineer can be sued. (Score:5, Informative)
You can sue anyone for anything, but only a very narrow range of circumstances will allow you to win a suit. We don't assume a code monkey has any liability for unknown bugs, or unexpected environments his code is ran in, because he is not a PE. Accredited and trained "Engineers" have a significantly different skill base, perspective, and liability.
Re:An Engineer can be sued. (Score:5, Interesting)
This. The difference is the PE exam. Engineers must take this exam in order to do real engineering work, and it is not required of Computer Science majors. It's what makes the "real" engineer liable in cases of structural failure or poor design. The computer science field is very different; in many cases, we build on many others' work and cannot vouch for the accuracy of said work. Trust me, as a computer scientist, you don't WANT to be a PE.
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I think it's rather the other way around, if software is required by law to have that level of correctness guarantee, all software development in that region would end. For one, we don't have an OS like that, so we don't even have a platform to run software on.
Even now it can take a whole day to write a dozen lines of code. For 100% bug free code, we'd be taking a month. It would cost hundreds of billions and several decades to develop something resembling DOS... And then there's the problem of a bug-free c
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Even if we used OS certified for safety critical systems (devices in hospitals)
or used plain interrupts without any OS and could inspect firmware code on chip,
our manager would still allocate 2 hours to finish the task instead of two days.
Re:An Engineer can be sued. (Score:4, Informative)
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If you are developing MISRA-compliant code for a safety-critical application, you will be given the time you need, and your boss will ensure the code is double, triple, and quadruple tested and reviewed.
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The Space Shuttle code is famous for having been written to engineering standards. The time and cost is well understood.
I got the high marks in my fancy college's Software Engineering program and only once have I had the opportunity to write code of that quality. I was the team lead on surgical planning software and got to set up the whole environment to my specs. And even at that I saw how we could do better with infinite NASA money.
It's incredibly rare that anybody wants to pay for software engineering.
T
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Unfortunately this is with the advent of self-driving cars and a lot of other functionality no longer the case.
Deaths and injuries due to software flaws have already happened so software can't be exempt.
Re:An Engineer can be sued. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the engineer personally signs off on it, as is required by law in some jurisdictions, he can be sued personally.
Which is why "engineer" needs a licence, and thus software engineers, being unlicensed, are not engineers.
I would strongly oppose that all software writing needs licensing, but certainly some of the higher-end for-profit software writing probably could do with real engineering with all the trappings. It'd force the software writers (*cough* microsoft *cough*) to step up their game, and provide and guarantee dependability rather than encourage end-users to just suck up the trouble their shoddy software tends to cause.
And, well, it's not a bad idea to protect the "engineer" part of the job title. "Customer satisfaction engineer", seriously now? Put a licensing requirement on anything that calls itself "engineer" and poof goes the madness. Well, some of the madness.
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Re: An Engineer can be sued. (Score:3)
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Licensing is merely an artificial regulatory capture in North America.
No, it isn't. Engineers do NOT need a license in America.
A license is only needed for a PE.
Most practicing engineers are NOT PEs.
I have an engineering degree. I've been employed as an engineer for decades. I do not have, and have never had, a PE license.
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About as much as having to pass bar or getting your medical licence.
Not at all.
A lawyer must pass the bar exam to be a lawyer.
A medical doctor must have a medical degree and a license from the government.
Here are the requirements to be employed as an engineer: { }
No license or degree is legally required for most engineering jobs.
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And you can get sued for malpractice even if you aren't titled Engineer.
So liability isn't a real question here.
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Not quite. Usually you can only go after gross negligence. If the one doing this is a recognized expert (here: engineer) you can go after simple negligence and lack of conformance with the state-of-the-art. That is a _huge_ difference.
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Well... (Score:4, Funny)
What about "Network Engineers" or "Site Reliability Engineers"?
Technically you can't sue "Site Reliability Engineers" because the title does not say which direction they engineer the site reliability.
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How about "Domestic Engineer"? "Sanitation Engineer"?
Re:Well... (Score:4, Funny)
How about "Domestic Engineer"?
Domestic engineers can be sued if they sneak across the border and clean foreign houses.
Human Fail safes aren't engineers either (Score:4, Interesting)
Train "Human Fail Safes" aren't engineers either, but have the title "Locomotive Engineer" as well, but require no formal training in electrical or mechanical engineering.
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I am perfectly content with being called a programmer.
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They want the prestige without the responsibility.
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Maybe they need the title to make them feel better about a lower salary
https://www.glassdoor.com/blog... [glassdoor.com]
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They also have a tremendous amount of legal liability. Why in God's good name anyone would want that title who hasn't earned it or had it thrust upon them is beyond me. I am perfectly content with being called a programmer.
It is not that about whether anybody really wants that. It is that it is sorely needed to end the mess in software. All other engineering disciplines have done it and only after having done it did things get better. See collapsing bridges and buildings, steam engines blowing up, electrical wiring killing people, etc. Software is a technological product and must go that way as well. It is far too critical to allow it to remain in its current, really bad state. Also remember that it is not all bad. As soon as
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I'm sure they'll want their pound of flesh from them too.
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correct me if I'm wrong but the word engineer up until designers claimed it as their own meant to be the person responsible for keeping the fire going in steam locomotives. They tossed coal into the boiler, kept the engine going. Thus engineer.
I'm not sure how designers of buildings, mechanical parts etc took over the word.
Not an unheard of thought though. (Score:5, Informative)
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Thank goodness Canada doesn't have a similar right.
That said, there is precedent for the use of the term 'engineer' when qualified, as in a locomotive engineer. Or the use of the title for a company position. Which in some states is exempt from the professional registration requirement. So I guess calling someone a software engineer isn't too much of a stretch. Should such an exemption not exist, even for employees working on company products, then perhaps the term could be restricted to those with the req
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"I am an engineer." -- Something anyone can say.
"I have an engineering degree from <respected university>." -- Something fewer people can say.
Re:Not an unheard of thought though. (Score:4, Insightful)
You may know that everything down to the screws used in an aeroplane needs to be "certified". That doesn't mean the screws are super-duper screws. They could be shitty. It means that there's a certificate that says exactly how shitty or good the screws are. Such a certificate gets issued by a duly appointed certificator. It means everything in an aeroplane can be traced in case of need, checked against regulations and specifications, and so on, and so forth. It helps figure out what went wrong should an aeroplane fall out of the sky, if it didn't turn out to help against making the plane not fall out of the sky in the first place.
You, mr. certified screw, er, engineer, have an engineering degree issued by a duly appointed degree issuer. That means means you're certified to know your stuff up to a certain standard. It doesn't mean it's good, it means there's a baseline you can officially be trusted to reach. Much like a driver's licence, but for engineering.
I used to know a guy who was a very good welder, but he wasn't allowed to weld the steel-framed heel to one of the club's gliders that'd broken off. So he had to go to the national gliding centre where a duly certified welder welded the heel back on. Shittily, our guy could do a much better job, but he wasn't certified. Without that certification his weld would have resulted in a voided airworthiness certificate and a spiffily-welded glider that was not allowed to fly.
The point of your engineering school isn't what they teach you. The point is they certify you.
Re:Not an unheard of thought though. (Score:4, Interesting)
The point of your engineering school isn't what they teach you. The point is they certify you.
Nope.
I'm an engineer, but not a certified P Eng. I did an engineering degree and they teach you a bunch. If you want to be certified then you need to do a certification from a professional standards body, after the degree and a bunch of industry work.
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There is nothing my offcial "engineering school" taught me that I couldn't have learned on wikipedia.
Then your "engineering school" was worthless and you wasted both your time and money. And you're probably a menace to society since you still pretend you're an engineer.
Re:Not an unheard of thought though. (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
"Oregon can't stop people from calling themselves engineers, judge rules in Traffic-Light-Math-Gate"
Licensing red-tape violate First Amendment, says court in battle over timing algorithm
Oregon's regulations stopping people in the US state from referring to themselves as engineers are unconstitutional, a federal magistrate judge has ruled.
The decision was sought by Mats Järlström, a Swedish electronics engineer living in Oregon, who was fined in 2016 for calling himself an engineer in correspondence with state officials and doing math. ...
Re:Not an unheard of thought though. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oregon had a similar issue up until a court ruled that 1st amendment rights, afford by the us constitution, allowed anyone to call themselves an engineer.
Does that mean everyone has first amendment rights to call themselves a medical doctor?
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a court ruled that 1st amendment rights, afford by the us constitution, allowed anyone to call themselves an engineer
Learn to read.
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Learn to read.
Oh gosh there's no way a court ruling on whether the first amendment overrides protected job titles could be extended to other jobs.
Learn to think.
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I wonder what the reasoning was in that court case. The 1st amendment doesn't just allow me to claim to be a lawyer, for example.
Re:Not an unheard of thought though. (Score:5, Informative)
The context was a person writing a letter to the State commenting on traffic signal programming, and signing the letter as an engineer. The licensing board attempted to fine the person. He was, in fact, a qualified engineer who wasn't working as an engineer, and didn't have State licensing, though that was not relevant to the case. The court ruled that since the speech didn't actually have to do with him working as engineer (he wasn't applying for a job without a license, or any similar thing) that it didn't matter if he was an engineer or not, he could call himself one if he wanted.
It was a major smack-down to the licensing board; the judge could have merely ruled that the guy had an engineering degree, and wasn't applying to work, so it was ok. But citing the 1st Amendment, instead of the facts of the case, produced a major curtailment in the enforcement actions of the licensing board. Now, they can only fine people who are actually trying to do the work without a license, instead of anybody who uses the word.
Prior to the ruling there was the strange situation where software engineers could get a software engineering degree in the State, and list it on their resume, but since software engineering isn't one of the types of engineering regulated by the State, they couldn't call themselves an engineer. Now, there is no such problem.
And you can call yourself a lawyer, as long as you're not giving legal advice at the same time, or asking for payment for some service that relates to being a lawyer. For example, you could give yourself the title Plot Lawyer and sell editing services.
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Ideally confirmed or verified during the interview process. :P
I hope you don't mean the company interview process. That's not ideal in any sense of the word. "Mr Dangerous Idiot" can design something that kills someone, get fired and then make it through an interview process at the next job fresh off his liability lawsuit and kill the next person.
Many engineering associations around the world don't focus on the title, but rather the activity. They define what is engineering (driving a train is not engineering), and then say that people undertaking engineering need to
Re:Not an unheard of thought though. (Score:4, Interesting)
Can you imagine the police showing up at your door to arrest you for offending people on the internet? In other countries this really does happen, and instead of being horrified, they cheer.
Of course they cheer. They don't want the brown shirts to haul them off. That's not cheers of assent so much as it is cheers for compliance.
I've had contact with APEGA myself (Score:4, Informative)
A few years ago my employers had ideas about setting up shop in Alberta, and with "Engineering" in the company name we promptly got a cease and desist letter from the nice APEGA folks claiming exclusive rights to the word "engineer" in the province.
The powers-that-be changed their mind before anything more happened.
...laura
Re: I've had contact with APEGA myself (Score:3)
Sounds fair to me (Score:2)
Even though like most I consider myself a software engineer, I have to say I agree that maybe engineering should be locked down to a more rigorous definition.
The real problem is that I don't think a traditional engineering degree is even possible for software engineering yet, not in the same way a "real" engineer can be sure something will work and have guaranteed levels of durability. Well, maybe firmware software engineers... but not the rest of us.
However this particular case really sound more like a sh
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Like most? Not even close. You'd have to be either incredibly arrogant or incredibly ignorant to call yourself a "software engineer". I'm absolutely disgusted every time I see someone describe themselves that way. It's absolutely disgraceful.
There is nothing that programmers do that is even remotely like engineering.
The real problem is that I don't think
What you think doesn't matter. You're a programmer that has, for years, pretended to be an engineer.
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There is nothing that programmers do that is even remotely like engineering.
Ya but I can npm install engineering-package
Also leftpad
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One problem with building software that won't fail is its interconnectedness - the ability for one part's failure to propagate to another part. Imagine if a bridge's anti-collision lights failing could cause the bridge deck to fall. Structural engineers don't have that problem.
Another problem is the reliance on third-party software. It simply costs too much to develop everything in-house, but the moment you rely on another is when you give up any correctness guarantees. Nobody's willing to sell you an OS th
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ok, but how do you gauge risk accurately for software projects?
I am open to this kind of discussion.
Re:Sounds fair to me (Score:5, Interesting)
For automotive there's a standard, ISO-26262:2018, for series produced vehicles that deals with functional safety. I'll try to illustrate how that attempts to deal with risk, or rather, ensuring safety (=> absence of risk in the case of e.g. a failure in electric/electronic element). Part 5 of this standard deals with software development.
In short, you define 'safety goals' (SG, a top level safety-related requirement) for a system of the vehicle, at the vehicle level. For this system you perform a hazard and risk analysis (HARA) and its report will contain/output the SGs.
Each specific SG (usually) have an associated 'automotive safety integrity level' (ASIL A, B, C or D) that depends on how bad it might be if the safety goal was violated. The ASIL level then results in different sets of requirements being placed on the development of the system, including requirements on the development of software. An ASIL D means the toughest quality standard, and ASIL A is the least tough ASIL quality standard. Then there is 'QM', which isn't ASIL, and means the ISO standard doesn't require anything in particular, sow we're left with the company's normal quality management.
Basically the intention is to ensure spending enough effort on the more important safety-related parts, including making sure they're sufficiently verified and validated.
For example, the SG might be something like 'The vehicle shall prevent inadvertently starting to move more than 0.3 metres when at standstill (ASIL C)'. The reason for the SG, found in the HARA report, might e.g. that buses often park close to each other while pedestrians walking between them. And if a bus would start to move on its own due to a fault, that could be bad for someone standing in front the bus - they or the driver might e.g. not notice it in time.
From this SG, the engineers derive functional safety requirements, and then technical safety requirements. It's an iterative process depending on the number of levels of systems, but eventually we'll reach a system with an ECU, for which we derive requirements on its software.
Through this process, the ASIL is passed on with the requirements. So you might have a software requirement that ultimately traces back to the SG above that says 'The software system shall command the brakes to be applied while the vehicle is at standstill and the accelerator pedal is unpressed (ASIL C)'.
Note: I'm simplifying quite a bit here, e.g. skipping safety mechanisms, ASIL decomposition and freedom of interference. There's also a lot about doing fault tree analysis, FMEAs, diagnostic test coverage. For software development it also results in requiring a lot of verification (e.g testing) at various levels.
I hope this helps
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For the aviation industry, they do a good job defining everything, and then they test it to hell and back. They spend a lot of time testing.
For the medical industry (as I've worked on medical devices), it's honestly amazing they don't kill more people.
Domestic engineer (Score:2)
Let's also forbid "domestic engineer", used to make the position of house-boy (who lives in a boy-house, seriously), cleaning-staff supervisor and wife sound important. The word engineer suggests some level of training, although several jobs have become so common that additional training is no longer necessary.
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My company has gotten such C&D's in the USA (Score:3)
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Yeah, you can only trust those shifty engineers like ~99.99999% of the time. Totally worthless. Might was well let any idiot build bridges.
What's wrong with you?
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It's Pretty Much PEs That Are the Problem (Score:2)
This has happened in Oregon, as previously stated. I think the upshot is that PEs are twats. I've met several and I've never come across more overinflated, self-important arseholes than PEs. Well, neurosurgeons are up there, too.
Tell them to shut up and sit down.
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Dr. ? (Score:4, Insightful)
so is software a question of engineering or architecture or design or maybe there are software doctors or software lawyers or software politicians or software carpenters or softaware economists or software farmers maybe?
Software developers are rarely doing any actual engineering or design or a software surgery. Often what we see is software is throw it at the wall and see what sticks, especially true when any subsequent modification can randomly break anything that was working previously. When a software developer decides that he can and will assume some serious responsibility, then maybe he can get himself a title of an engineer.
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A law for Civil/Mechanical/Architectual Engineers (Score:2)
In most states, in order to "sign off" on construction drawings, and other critical infrastructure design documentation, a PE license is required. In a small but substantial subset of these states, obsolete laws are still on the books forbidding anyone lacking PE certification/licensing from offering their services as an engineer, or in sine cases, the specific title of "Professional Engineer".
You may have a PhD in Electrical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Nuclear Engineering, or {..your major here..}
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obsolete laws are still on the books forbidding anyone lacking PE certification/licensing from offering their services as an engineer
Obsolete? The last thing we need is a bunch of amateurs running around calling themselves engineers and certifying things because they watched a few youtube videos.
Logical? Possibly not.
Very logical. In your imaginary scenario, why weren't your super-duper "engineers" able to get through what, for them, should have been a very simple process?
I know guys like that. They want all the benefits and privileges but don't want to put in any effort. They want to be considered experts, but they don't want to prove that they're expert
What exactly is the difference? (Score:2)
Let's assume that engineers should be licensed, in order to ensure public trust and keep standards high. Is there some distinction between software engineering and other engineering professions, that sets it apart with regards to the need for standards and trust?
Software engineers do their work "on a computer." These days, pretty much every kind of engineer does their work "on a computer."
When engineers fail to do their jobs correctly, there is a high risk to lives and property. This is also true of many so
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Only a small minority of software is written to this standard. Note that the APEGA is not saying that no one should be called a software engineer, just that those people who do go by that title should be subject
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All of what you say applies to software engineering as well as civil engineering. There are programmers who are not engineers, of course. These are the handymen of the software world. These handyman programmers can make apps or web sites, and some of them are good at it. But that's a far cry from a system that has to process hundreds of thousands of credit card transactions per second, or perform DNA matching at a large scale.
This is similar to how a handyman can build a bridge across a backyard creek. That
Trains (Score:2)
Valid Argument for PEng,but not for using the word (Score:3)
The word engineer means to design something for a purpose. Anyone who does that is engineering something, and so is an engineer. They have a valid argument if someone who calls themselves a professional engineer offers a service without being certified by them. But to claim sole use of a word and concept is utter bullshit.
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If you're willing to nullify the word, then sure. Render it meaningless, and be on your way. And any idiot who can modify anything can call themselves a "doctor". You must be in favour of that too.
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And yes anyone can call them selves a doctor, do you think the Rug Doctor went medical school to learn how to clean rugs? Prefix the word doctor with Medical then the whole picture changes, you better have a medic
Re: Valid Argument for PEng,but not for using the (Score:2)
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I agree, just one nitpick. Engineer can also mean a person who operates an engine. Which is why train drivers or people who supervise engines on ships are also called engineers.
What does APEGA actually do for the money? (Score:4, Informative)
Beyond them forcing Canada to use different titles for jobs than everywhere else, solely to get money from people they do nothing for... What is the goal or benefit here? Do they feel like the name is being diluted? Do they "own" that word? If yes to them owning it, then yell at your legislators to fix this stupidity.
I had to laugh at this other version of Apega on wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ) for an "ancient torture device". That seems like a synonym for agencies that take money without giving anything back.
Permit and fees (Score:2)
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If you're okay with Software Engineer (Score:2)
... you're probably also okay with "Sandwich Architect".
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IT job titles are fuct to hell & back (Score:3)
IT job titles are very close to useless. The problem is most IT jobs are usually a mix of tasks such that to express a given position, you'd have to give a percent of time spent on a list of tasks.
And good portion of time is often spent troubleshooting layers: one doesn't know whether the problem is the network, hardware, the app software, the browser, user confusion, the database, etc. without examining each one. Thus, you often have to know at least little of everything. We specialize, but the specialties are all tied to together to some degree via layers, dependencies, and networks. Our systems are onions caught in spider webs, which are also part of bigger onions.
How about "StackOverflow Sifter"? That's as good as any title I know of.
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How about "StackOverflow Sifter"? That's as good as any title I know of.
Is that a step above "Google Coder"?
the problem is they want to have it both ways (Score:2, Insightful)
Looking at your customer or your employer and saying to them "I am an engineer" then immediately turning around and looking at the regulatory agency telling them "I am not an engineer" is disingenuous.
Why do you want to call yourself an engineer rather than an expert or a technician or something else?
Even if the general public doesn't know the specific requirements for earning a p.eng they do know that when somebody shows up to do the job and introduces themselves as the engineer they're getting somebody wi
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Looking at your customer or your employer and saying to them "I am an engineer" then immediately turning around and looking at the regulatory agency telling them "I am not an engineer" is disingenuous.
Telling anyone I am an engineer, but not a chartered engineer is not disingenuous.
Almost none of these code monkeys with a text editors are engineers.
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Good on you for presenting yourself as what you are and explicitly not as what you're not.
I doubt those passing themselves off as more qualified than they really are will follow your lead.
I'm not surprised (Score:2)
So I can completely
There isn't even a comparison (Score:4, Informative)
I just paid my APEGA dues for the 40th time as a licensed professional engineer in Alberta. I got the computer science degree right after qualifying as a P.Eng. by working for Fluor as a structural engineer.
After some years doing lower-level computer support (Alberta in an awful recession at the time, we are the "upside-down", in pain when oil is low and the rest of the continent is having a boom, Reagan running on "are you better off now" in '84) I got back to an engineering job with Waterworks, as their IT manager, dealing with the IT department and contractors.
A half-dozen years of that, then as the "Infrastructure Engineer" making all the GIS maps, doing our own IT, dealing with IT department, various contractors for a very engineering-specific need, and all the infrastructure-evaluation calcs that arose from the mapped inventory and all the work orders up all the assets.
And there's just no comparison between the way that professional engineering design and construction of infrastructure works, versus how "software engineering" works.
Professional engineering has developed a stern culture of *responsibility* - responsibility is demanded; the culture requires absolute tracking of who signed off on everything. Software engineering, as "Dilbert" was documenting 25 years back, is all about fobbing off responsibility on the customer - the important thing is to get "sign-off", after which you just bill them for hours, not for outcomes. The bad outcome is always the customer's responsibility.
Plumbers take more responsibility; a software-engineering plumber would hold a meeting with slides about how he was going to build your bathroom, which you didn't really understand, get "sign-off"; then build you one where the toilet flush causes a fountain from the sink, which would be your fault since you signed-off on the pipe diameters and elevations.
The clouds of confusion around software engineering, and the lack of responsibility, are how you get your healthcare.gov debacles where the fixit team doubled the speed on Day 1 because the contractors hadn't indexed the main database; it was searching all America for every record.
Engineering mistakes happen, but not insanely-stupid disasters like that, because the cultures are utterly different. There's no comparison. This is not to demean the expertise of many great software people who take a true engineer's attitude to their work; I think most like that must move away from large programming employers, to be their own business, where they can have a true engineering culture, because software businesses, knowing they can get away with murder in a "software engineering" culture, want nothing to do with real engineering responsibility.
I believe that most of the software that we really have to trust - real-time control - is done by electrical engineers that added software degrees, as I did to civil engineering, and most are small firms - certainly true of nearly all the water-treatment control systems I knew about.
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Do you need an ice pack after trying that hard to pat yourself on the back?
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Just call them 'programmers', if they're any good, 'coders' if you hate them personally.
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I have lived her my whole life, right in the middle of "redneck central". I've never seen a confederate flag on a vehicle, and I've driven across this province hundreds of times. Don't mistake a little slice of media portrayal for reality.
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I have lived her my whole life, right in the middle of "redneck central".
It's Canada, right? Hoser central?