Posted on 03/30/2003 7:38:16 AM PST by weegee
An engineer by any other name
Legislature to decide if computer programmers can legally use the title
By R.G. RATCLIFFE
Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau
AUSTIN -- One of the oddest battles of the 78th Legislature is pitting Texas' licensed professional engineers against the high-tech industry's software dudes.
At issue is just who in Texas can call himself an engineer.
"It's one of the silliest issues we're having to deal with this session, but it's also one of the most important," said Steven Kester, legislative director of the American Electronics Association, an organization of computer companies.
Texas has one of the nation's strictest engineering practices acts and limits the title of engineer to those people who have studied engineering and passed a licensing exam.
And that law puts most of the "engineers" in the high-tech industry out of the field. Kester said the restriction threatens high-tech growth in Texas.
But Ken Rigsbee, chairman of the Texas Society of Professional Engineers legislative committee, said the restriction is needed to protect the public.
Rigsbee said state restrictions on who can call themselves engineers were set up decades ago after someone misengineered a heating pipe system at the New London Junior-Senior High School.
An explosion of natural gas in the pipe system killed 300 students and teachers in 1937.
Rigsbee said the licensed professional engineers of Texas have been protecting their title from encroachment ever since. There are 49,000 state-licensed professional engineers.
Rigsbee said the high-tech problem mostly involves computer programmers whom the industry likes to call computer engineers.
Rigsbee said the industry holds out its products as having been "engineered." And he said there is a belief that the computer companies are in a better position to win contracts if they can say they have 150 engineers on staff instead of 150 programmers.
"What we have a problem with is a graduate of a two-year computer programming school or some technicians ... holding themselves out as engineers when they clearly are not," Rigsbee said.
The computer industry had been happy to function under an exemption in state law that allowed a company to call in-house personnel whatever it wanted to so long as the engineering title was not held out to the public.
But the Texas Board of Professional Engineers sent cease-and-desist letters to some high-tech industry specialists who used the title of engineer in correspondence.
That led to a request to former Attorney General John Cornyn to clarify the issue. Cornyn last July said the matter is simple when it comes to state law.
"The Texas Engineering Practice Act ... does not allow an in-house employee of a private corporation, though classified internally as an `engineer' or under another engineering title, to use the title `engineer' on business cards, cover letters or other forms of correspondence that are made available to the public," Cornyn said.
Boom. In a single sentence, the computer programming engineers of Texas became software dudes.
Actually, while software programmers make up the bulk of the high-tech industry's engineers, the industry also uses the title for electrical and mechanical engineers not licensed by the state. Texas Instruments also has "customer support engineers."
"Texas is becoming a laughingstock of the global high-technology community," said Steve Taylor, director of corporate affairs for Applied Materials.
Taylor said there are about 100,000 high-tech personnel in Texas who have "engineer" in their title, but they are not licensed by the state.
"They risk fines of up to $3,000 a day for handing out business cards to a supplier or even dropping it in a fish bowl at a restaurant for a chance at a free lunch," Taylor said.
AEA's Kester said electronics professionals from around the country are called engineers within their firms and in the industry. Suddenly, he said, they are now required to carry one set of business cards for Texas and another for the other 49 states.
"It's a matter of professional pride," Kester said. "They've built up a lot of experience and earned the title of engineer in their industry."
Kester said the electronics industry has made changing the state law a top priority because it is making it difficult to recruit employees from other states and around the world.
"We run the risk of not having them move here," Kester said. "That puts us at a significant disadvantage."
Legislation to loosen the title requirements is being carried by Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, and Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa.
railroad engineers, domestic engineers ...
Sorry I don't mean to start a flame war. I was reacting to how some people down there saw it fit to define criteria for Engr. based on their interpretations.
What REALLY needs to be stopped, which isa totally different thing, is crap like the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineers misnomer. Microsoft is not any kind of accredited educational agency, nor are the people associated with this program involved with "engineering" anything at all.
I agree on PE for Civil/Mechanical, etc. Also agree with you about MCSE being not really Engineering and IT programmers not being real engineers. No argument about that.
My point was about EEs. How can you expect EEs to go through the PE crap when we mostly work for private corps. and have very little contribution to public works, like Civil/Mechanical guys do? We work on cutting edge technologies, make significant intellectual property contributions (just compare patents in EE related fields to Civil/Mechanical) and don't think some 50 year old bureaucrat in Austin should sign off on our certification. That was the point I was trying to make. I did not mean to come across as insulting.
That, or something similar, may be a reasonable compromise. I think that in Colorado, anyway, those are the only areas where you can even get a PE license. (My wife's the one who did the EIT exam, her degree is in materials engineering. I'm just a bit pusher ;-).
Software engineering is too new and varied to be licensed. And, the public-safety aspect of software engineering is missing, so the state should just butt out.
Actually, that (public safety) seems like an excellent reason for the state to butt in. I've worked with lots of people who call themselves software engineers (I've had Senior Software Engineer on my biz card or job description for quite a few years), but most of them are just programmers who know bugger all about engineering, either from the safety aspect (its amazing how few have heard of the RISKS digest, let alone read it) or from the economic aspect (know who Boehm is, understand COCOMO (Constructive Cost Model), etc.)
This is perhaps less true in some specific industries (aviation, military, etc) where the risks of defective software are clearer and where there are mandated processes and procedures to follow. Those processes do greatly bog down the development process, but they're necessary because most programmers, despite the "engineer" in their job titles, really are clueless about developing robust and reliable software.
(And yeah, some of the reasons for that is because the field is relatively new and the technology changes quickly -- but that's all the more reason for care when developing life critical applications. And bear in mind that even a database app can be life critical in a medical, law enforcement or military context.)
Thank you for demonstrating the exact problem with the state of software development today.
"If the Bold doesn't work, no one will die." How do you know that? I can think up scenarios where if the bold doesn't work, someone could well die. Patient care instructions where something other than the usual is normally highlighted in bold -- printout doesn't have any bold text, overworked nurse misses the special instructions, patient dies. (Sure, there are other problems in the overall methods and procedures if that happens, but it could happen.)
That sort of sloppy thinking gets carried through to other applications. Read the RISKS newsgroup (comp.risks) or digest for numerous examples. Not all fatal by any means, but ranging from that through having ones life ruined (think identity theft) and a few examples of plain inconvenience.
I guess my point is that, unless you know absolutely all the possible uses your software will be put, you'd better write it as though somebody's life depended on it, because it might. (Well, modulo the cost of such development, which is a real engineering trade-off too.)
We are in agreement there...
"If the Bold doesn't work, no one will die." How do you know that? I can think up scenarios where if the bold doesn't work, someone could well die. Patient care instructions where something other than the usual is normally highlighted in bold -- printout doesn't have any bold text, overworked nurse misses the special instructions, patient dies. (Sure, there are other problems in the overall methods and procedures if that happens, but it could happen.)
Well, what you are describing is not a Word Processor, which was what I was referring to... However, what you ARE describing would be something that, if used in the treatment and diagnosis of a patient, would be required to be classified as a medical device - in which case, it would require a 510K... In order to GET the OK to release, it would need to undergo far more stringent testing and validation - not so with Microsoft, for example, releasing Microsoft Word... Nice try though...
That sort of sloppy thinking gets carried through to other applications. Read the RISKS newsgroup (comp.risks) or digest for numerous examples. Not all fatal by any means, but ranging from that through having ones life ruined (think identity theft) and a few examples of plain inconvenience.
Preaching to the choir, man... I could tell you horror stories about bad software - software that kills - think 'X-Ray Machine of Death' as a perfect example...
I guess my point is that, unless you know absolutely all the possible uses your software will be put, you'd better write it as though somebody's life depended on it, because it might. (Well, modulo the cost of such development, which is a real engineering trade-off too.)
Well, since I work in a field where 'someone's life depends on it', I look at software different than a large percentage of the industry. Any software I work on is not a game, and I certainly do not look at it as such
Think you need to head back to College Station for a refresher in English grammer. Your 4th and 5th paragraphs look like Greek. : )
With Regards.....
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