The States have their own engineering boards to give out and monitor engineer license status. Why isn’t there one for software engineering?
There used to be one! It was discontinued (a) for lack of interest since no jobs or regulations require it, and (b) because being eligible to sit for the Professional Engineer (P.E.) exam requires having spent X years (X=4 or more, depending on circumstances) working under the supervision of a licensed P.E., and not many software engineers worked under licensed P.E.s.
(I’m a software engineer with a civil EIT license and worked in the software industry under a civil P.E., so think I would’ve actually been one of the weirdos in a position to be licensed as a software P.E. Unfortunately, they did away with it before I got the chance.)
That last bit makes a lot of sense, actually, about not having enough licensed P.E. to work under for four years or more. That’s kind of a bummer, because the person I was responding to isn’t wrong, we’re handing the reigns of sysadmin duties to a lot of relatively under-trained folks.
However, on the flip side, the fact that we don’t have such a thing is part of what makes the internet so open. Literally anyone is allowed to make their own website.
