Especially since the conflicting statements of "software jobs need protection to ensure good salaries" and "everybody needs to code" are all to prevalent here.
Being a PE means you have a certain level of experience and skill. It's a distinguishing feature and sets you apart as a "real" engineer. Additionally, it holds you to an ethical code.
What continues to astound me is the lack of rigor and ethical backbone coming from engineers in important places. Yeah you're not building a bridge, but incidents like Volkswagen and Yahoo could have been prevented if people's jobs were bound by not being unethical.
I also suspect that everyone is asking the wrong questions. From the anti algorithm questions for interviews crowd, there is scant acknowledgement that it can't be a blanket policy, as undoubtedly some positions are strongly algorithm-heavy roles. From the pro- crowd, there is scant acknowledgement that by the time you are trying to find new high tech hires through a process that bases an evaluation upon actual interactions that are measured in hours or at best days, you may have already failed. The industry is fitting an interviewing process last majorly overhauled during the industrial age that screens for basic three-R's and attendance skills onto a post-industrial landscape where those skills are barely above cosmic background radiation noise, and demonstrated achievers are as often groomed into hirings through networking over years and decades. Perhaps part of the response to better outcomes to "this high tech interviewing process that takes place in hours or days" isn't "find better questions" or "find a better procedure that still fits in hours or days", but "re-think our premises"? Some kind of PE might fit into that re-think, but the brokenness is so bad that Google has quantified the inability of our conventional processes to yield significantly-better-than-random outcomes, so it might be time to start questioning the entire premise that we can even hire based upon tech interviews in the first place.
I suspect the typical PE exam is quite a bit more rigorous than the typical technical interview. Technical software engineer interviewees are asked to do thinks like reverse linked lists and provide the most basic runtime and space complexity analysis. The structural engineering PE covers everything from load analysis and building codes to runoff analysis an slope stability[1]. There are 9 different "breadth" exam areas and 3 different "depth" areas, and they're all covered.
I think it's slightly ridiculous to compare understanding basic datastructures and algorithms to sitting for a PE.
[1] http://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/Civ-Str-April-2015_with-...
If it were possible to sue a software developer to recover their salary and for damages done, you'd better believe that nearly all (though not all) of the people who are rather less than qualified would be out of the profession.
But software engineers doesn't have any such designation or examination process, so I don't understand this analogy. If anyone could call themselves a doctor, then the interview process would have to be far more rigorous.
Also, I think doctors do need to rewrite certain exams every few years to retain their medical license.
For whatever reason, the software engineering profession has no such professional organization. Perhaps it is because software engineering is a relatively new field. Many of the examples of functioning professional associations are related to very old professions (e.g. doctors, lawyers, and even actuaries), and some have their roots in the medieval system of guilds and apprenticeships. The MBA and CFA professional designations were established in the 1940s.
Somehow it is difficult to imagine that, at this point, a software engineering professional designation could ever be established.
Licensing has been proven to work for other engineering fields.
