I work for a consulting company that does mechanical engineering services, including mechanical engineering analysis and design outsourcing and R&D (among other things). My quick survey of the business cards up front indicates that about 20-25% (5 out of 24) of our engineers (analysis and design) have PEs. I personally don’t and haven’t seen the need for me to get one, although I realize that it’s almost a necessity if you’re a civil engineer. Most of our projects don’t require the engineer to have a PE, although I’m sure there are some that do (R&D in particular, the director of which has a PE).
Actually, I think medicine parallels the Engineering debate quite well. For example, just because you have an MD does NOT mean you are licensed to practice medicine, or that you are even trained to do so-it just means that you have graduated from an accredited medical school-case in point my friend who works for a consulting firm but couldn’t pass a licensure exam if his life depended on it (mostly because he trained in Pathology).
Licensed professional: P.E./licensed MD
Degreed worker: BscE/MD
Person with some relevant training but NOT trained for the same job: MCSE/DC (chiropractor) DPM (podiatrist) -also optometrists, psychologists etc (and don’t for a minute think that most people know the difference between an optometrist and an ophthalmologist)
Totally untrained person coopting title: Pizza Delivery Engineer/Lawn Doctor
It seems the doctors have learned to live with the above ambiguity, so maybe the engineers could too. Now if they would just stop calling us Health Care Providers…
Relax, bdgr, I meant develop as in Software development. I thought that was clear from the, um, context. I’m in the middle of cleaning up some very messed up rights assignments on our (Novell) network myself. It’s not rocket science, but it is about as complex as any of the eutectic diagrams I studied when I was taking Chem Eng. courses, for whatever thats worth. (That and 99¢ will get you a 20 minute phone call.)
When I was doing some googling a while back, I came across a hit that said something to the respect that IBM and Cisco (or was it Novell?) renamed their “Engineers” to “Expert” due to this issue. I haven’t had much luck finding anymore info on it. Does anyone know anything of that? Any truth to it?
exactly everyone wants thier job to sound more important than it is.
I am an engineer.
no if no ands no buts.
I am an engineer.
I did not nor do i plan to take the PE exam in my state…
I however have worked for 11 yrs as an engineer with the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration and have a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from an ABET accrediated university i feel i have the right to call myself an engineer.
I too get royally upset when i meet some IT putz with nothing but a cert from whomever referring to themselves as an engineer. I do think something should be done. Talk about devalueing a term .
I say bravo to the folks in canada.
Something about a person not be able to pass a Calculus I class or never going past Algebra calling themselves an engineer really makes my blood boil
just my 2 cents
i have yet to meet an MD who considered chiropractors real doctors … granted i don’t know all MDs but i do know a couple of them.
is this crap above u say u “design a server” i say bullshit
u come no where near a circuit diagram showing ins and outs of processor.
A
A FUQING MAN
AMAN
Which basically says you take the technology I use digital logic to design and put the pre-fab units together.
Engineering means knowing the digital logic behind why the processors in the server work, how the D-flip flops store bits and how they work together to be registers. I can do the stuff you talked about here, but I didn’t learn that in engineering school.
As for the technology being ‘too new’ to learn in college, while it is true that you don’t learn every detail of networking a bunch of Pentiums running Windows 2000 and Sun Ultra 10s running Solaris 8, what we do spend a lot of time on is the designing and documenting of large scale VLSI projects, we learn hardware description languages and digital logic which will be used in the future to make generation after generation of new processors and to map the boards those chips plug into. We work with large scale software projects in both procedure and object oriented form and we learn the very low-level networking principles that allow bits and chips to travel through every media from coaxial cable to plastic to air so that when an MCSE needs a way to get things done, there are engineers out there publishing RFCs and IEEE standards to get it done.
What an MCSE or a CNE does depends on what engineers have done and continue to do, which is push electric circuitry to its absolute limits. If MCSE and CNE was all there was to it, we’d see MCSE standard 802.11, but we don’t. It’s IEEE, and I’m one of those Electrical & Electronics Engineers.
tourbot, so far I have only come up with a number for members of NSPE, which is 59,000. That is a measurement of how many PE’s joined NSPE.
I have been thinking about this over the weekend, and this will probably be my last post about it; as someone noted above, “the genie is already out of the bottle” and we’re fighting a losing battle sigh.
My $0.02:
It has been said that Joe Citizen goes about his daily routine enjoying the fruits of engineers’ work. ASCE and NSPE both have some PR blurbs about this on their web sites. I feel that the Joe Citizens of the country don’t understand how much engineers DO contribute to their quality of life.
Is this Ninety’s arrogant, holier-than-thou rant about lesser beings? Well…
ofcoursethehellnot.
I’m just standing up for the professional respect which I, and other engineers deserve. And part of respecting my profession is: not using the term “engineer” falsely.
I agree that the MSCE is every bit as imaginative, resourceful, creative, intelligent, etc. as the engineer is.
But PLEASE ! Cant’ you come up with your own professional monicker? Must you grab someone else’s ?? I kinda liked Grand Sorcerer from the beginning of this thread. 
Personally since I have taken over so many duties at work, teaching courses, dealing with all sorts of computer related and technological issues some of which require engineering expertise and some of which require a technical savvy that, although profound isn’t really engineering, my official job title should be changed to:
Semi Omnipotent Lord Engineer of Programming, Digital Logic, Networking and IT.
Or they could just go change my title to what my coworkers call me: That Computer Geek Type.
or probably they just call you:
HELLLLLLLLLLLLLLPPPPPPPPPPPPP !!!
then totally ignore you at the company picnic. 
Not much use, are we IT putzes. :rolleyes
Actually, I think being a Computer Engineer helps me out with the ‘not being ignored at company parties’ kind of thing, because they’re all wanting to see what the weird little nerd’s going to do next.
Not only can I take strange garbage and build even stranger stuff, I’m one of those socialized geeks who figured out that playing with computers and technology didn’t have to mean a life devoid of social contact with the oustide world. Yup, that’s right, there used to be Computer Engineering Bar Night back there in engineering school.
And unlike the last place I was, nobody here has ever asked me to run a continuity test or a wire map on the plastic stirrer in a white Russian, or to demonstrate in proper Boolean algebra the logic of that whole ‘Beer before liquor…’ rhyme that I can never remember.
I know, I know, you’ve gotta be thinking that I don’t really exist.
After all, female type Computer Engineers with social skills and reasonable looks are a figment of the imagination.
</ego-boosting hijack>
No one said that “IT putzes” aren’t much use- just that what you do IS NOT ENGINEERING.
Upon further review of the content of the exams (from the MS and Novell sites), the main thing that is certified by MSCE, CNE, etc. is that the person in question can answer a lot of questions about the particular companies products and their use. Whether that knowledge comes from rote memorization or actual experience is not important. Maybe someone who gives a damn should lobby to change that to something that means something useful- and change the freakin’ name while you’re at it.
Actually, I’m not sure what was meant by IT putzes in that context. Was it just low level operators and the guy who brings you a new desktop on the hand truck, or was that also meant to include developers and analysts?
As for the verb “to engineer”, while the question of who should be covered by the noun “engineer” is fairly clear, what does the verb really mean? Could the exact same work be “engineering” if done by a real engineer, but not if it’s done by a software developer who worked up through the ranks from programmer-trainee? What makes a piece of work “engineering”…is it whether it involves a lot of difficult math? Whether that math was learned in preparation for a B.S. <Sp>.E. program?
Even if we concede the restrictive use of the job title engineer, but as for the verb forms, I think this opens up a whole other can of worms. This is another reason why people resent the law so much. It’s OK if you tell me I’m not an engineer, but when you tell me that I don’t design and implement technological solutions to real world problems, them’s fighting words.
Oops, that should have been,
Even if we concede the restrictive use of the job title engineer, but the verb forms …
Personally I believe that more is covered by the verb form than by the noun form of the word.
Engineering a solution to something can be done by a person who isn’t an engineer, much like ‘doctoring’ something can be done by a person who isn’t a doctor of anything. For example, a couple of weeks ago a friend of mine engineered a solution to a power problem in a robot he built for fun on-the-fly, while I doctored a brownie recipe because I couldn’t obtain fresh raspberries at this time of year.
He’s not an Engineer, and I’m not a Doctor, but the verbs still applied.
And the more you get into a working environment, the more it happens that someone ‘engineers’ a functional solution or ‘doctors’ an existing product to deal with an unforseen circumstance.
So I can see your point about restricting a title but not a verb form.
Nor do I need to. Does a PE design every brick used to build a building? Computers are complex things, you have the people who design the components, the IC’s etc. You have people who take those building blocks and design the boards. Someone elses designs the chassis to hold all the boards, and then someone like my self determines what boards are going to be used, how they are configured, how the drives are partitioned, what kind of fault tolerance will be used, how it will connect to the network…Then I chose what operating system,how that will be configured, what applications will run on that server, and what the security scheme will be. I load it, configure, work out any problems that arise from incompatibility of the hardware, and deploy it. I creat groups, file structures, and assign rights to those structures.
I also do all this taking into account all the other servers, computers, and users…The big picture.
**
Thats a part of what I do
yep, you work with the stuff on a more basic level, and I in no way imply that what I do is as complicated as what you do. Yes, we couldnt do what we do without you, and what you do would be of no use without us. And again, I never called myself an engineer.