>University degrees for any professions are useless. Even in medicine!

I think there is a fundamental distinction between the professions of medicine and law, in that they have licensing boards that are a means of ensuring a standardized minimum amount of competency. Computer science does not.

Despite the fact that many call themselves "software engineers", they are not engineers in the legal sense of the word in US, unless they also have an engineering license. The point of these licenses is, in part, to protect society in professions where they are expected to ethically serve in the public good. One of the problems with CS degrees in the past is that there is no standardized curriculum, so one CS student may have had zero semesters of calculus and another required to take 4. The standardization is what helps pull structure from the ether. That structure is compromised when people cheat.

> I think there is a fundamental distinction between the professions of medicine and law, in that they have licensing boards that are a means of ensuring a standardized minimum amount of competency.

You might want to read the transcript of this This American Life episode:

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/719/trust-me-im-a-doctor

The summary: Licensing boards do a really poor job in maintaining quality. You can do extremely bad things as a doctor and still keep your license.

I'm certainly not claiming regulatory boards are perfect. Far from it. But I do maintain that some quality control and accountability is preferable to the alternative of no quality control and accountability.

We have slightly different opinions, but I thank you for taking the time to chat, and trusting that we can do so nicely.

The boards are to provide society comfort, but they enforce as you, said the minimum. Something just cannot be measured. This is very true in medicine as it contains a human aspect, as well as ethics aspect (I make more money if I see more people and give each less time).

When I was a teenager, I was losing hair due to Alopecia. My doctor at the time, who barely made sense (both of us were ESL) decided to put me on a course of prescription Iron pills. I was pooping black haha. Only later, I was told that I shouldn’t be taking it and that it was prescribed to me by accident by her because she had the file of another patient. Their last name was my first name, and they were pregnant female, I am a male.

The same doctor injected my mom with some drug and as she did, she said “oh shit” and “OMG” and decided not to tell my mom what it was. She tossed the bottle in hazardous waste box so my mom could not find out what it was. My dad was furious and made a scene as he and my mom naturally got worried. We went to this board and they said they did nothing wrong, and my parents were making a scene, and that we should find another doctor. So much for protecting my best interests and holding a bar.

These boards are mafia; another high profile thread about this is in HN right now. The boards are there to provide a facade of credibility.

> The point of these licenses is, in part, to protect society in professions where they are expected to ethically serve in the public good.

I don’t want to be called an engineer and opted out of license because I think most of engineers are doing the exact opposite. Working at companies that knowingly continue operating when we know it’s causing depression? Collecting data for users without them knowing?

Regarding equality of curriculum and standardization, I hear you. None of this is stuff we can ONLY get in school. I think the interview questions we all conduct at our jobs, or give when applying are doing just that. Checking minimum competency; tangentially I much prefer take home tests or something of that nature.

After this, I tend to think learning should be like gardening. Not all gardens are the same and they have different needs. You may need to learn more calculus if you are in robotics, but not if you are working on something really far from that. Another example, you might really need to learn about algorithms and databases if your job/interests require it.

Yeah, you're right. I think in the context of your story, the board seems like they did not do you justice. I can say from my experience with engineering boards, they seem to be more transparent and will publish their decisions and the underlying opinions on how they reached their conclusions. I think that added transparency goes a long way to mitigate the scenario when a regulating body ends up serving as a mechanism to avoid accountability for the group they are intended to regulate.

I think I agree with your gardening analogy. It seems to me that the issue is often rooted in the hiring process. If a company was able to adequately assess the skills, they wouldn't need to rely on credentials, period. I think credentials become a lazy shortcut in many ways. Sometimes I think this is borne from the fact that many hiring decisions are made by people who are too far removed from the work being hired for, and thus need some pragmatic shortcut. It's easier for HR to say "you don't have the right degree" than for them to read and understand your resume to conclude "you don't have the right skills". The first is binary, the latter requires a lot of nuance.

Many engineers in the US do not have PEs even when it's an option. If you're not having to sign off on regulatory agency-related documents, potentially doing expert witness-related work, etc. there's no need for it.

I started the process at one point in mechanical engineering (engineer in training exam) but moved on to a different type of job so there was never a reason to get the certification.

I understand most engineers work under industry exemptions. The ones that do not will have to work under a PE or be a PE themselves. In those cases, the work has been determined important enough to require the additional accountability of a PE stamp.

I'm not a big fan of credentials, but I understand when credentials become a proxy for something valuable. In some cases, the value of a PE is accountability and the legal authority for a PE to push back when they are being asked to do something unethical/unprofessional. I think one of the central issues of this thread is that the credential of a college degree has become so watered down that it has lost a lot of value.