Ed Nisley on Professional Engineering

I get a free subscription to Dr. Dobb's Journal. The March 2006 issue features an article by Ed Nisley titled "Professionalism." Ed is a software developer with a degree in Electrical Engineering. After working at a computer manufacturer for ten years in New York state, he decided to become a "consulting engineer." Following the state's advice, Ed pursued a license to be a Professional Engineer. Now, 20 years after first earning his PE license, Ed declined to renew it. He says "the existing PE license structure has little relevance and poses considerable trouble for software developers." You have to register with DDJ to read the whole article, but the process is free and the article is worthwhile.

Here are a few of Ed's reasons to no longer be a PE:

• "[T]o maintain my Professional Engineering license, I must travel to inconvenient places, take largely irrelevant courses, and pay a few kilobucks. As nearly as I can tell from the course descriptions, the net benefit would be close to zero."


• ["T]here's no generally applicable Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) upon which to base a Software Engineering examination, so (as I understand it) a Texas engineer seeking a PE license for software activities must demonstrate a suitable amount of experience, as attested by letters of recommendation." (He was discussing efforts in Texas to make software engineers be PEs.)


• "A 2001 ACM task force report on Licensing of Software Engineers Working on Safety-Critical Software concluded that professional licensing as it stands today simply wouldn't work in that field. They observe that very few 'software engineers' have an engineering degree accredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, which all state PE licensing boards require. Most programmers, it seems, don't have the opportunity to forget Thermo and Chem, having not studied them in the first place."


• "Software development also moves much faster than the NCEES testing process. Mechanical and electrical engineering questions dating back three decades remain perfectly useful, but most recent graduates have little knowledge of Fortran and GOTOs."


• "If you produce work as a PE, you must follow established design practices or risk a malpractice lawsuit when your design fails. Software engineering, even in the embedded field, simply doesn't have any known-good design practices: Most projects fail despite applying the current crop of Best Practices."


• "Worse, without a good self-imposed technical solution, we're definitely going to get legislative requirements that won't solve the problem."

If you think that creating a test designed for "software engineers" is a good idea, check out the rest of the article to see Ed's experience taking the exams. They sound like nothing more than a check to ensure the ability to answer a smattering of science and math questions.

The process reminded me of an exam we took at the Air Force Academy for what was then called (and may still be) Engineering 410. This was supposed to be a "capstone course" that all seniors took to demonstrate their engineering prowess. Yes, even your local history/political science double major took chemistry, physics (two courses), math (Cal III and Diff Eq), thermodynamics, and the five pure engineering courses (electrical, mechanical, civil, aeronautical, astronautical) prior to this capstone course. (That's why I have Bachelor of Science degrees and not BAs. At a normal college I would also have a minor in Engineering.)

To enter the capstone course, all students had to pass a cross-subject exam, where anything studied up to that point was fair game. I should add that non-engineering subjects like biology or the "soft sciences" were also included. If you failed the exam (with a possibility of one retake) you failed the course. If you took the course in the fall semester, you could return in the spring. If you took the course in the last semester of senior year (like me), and you failed the test, you were coming back for a special "fifth year" (USAFA has no real "fifth year" of study!) just to take Engineering 410.

In the dreamworld of the academic faculty, I'm sure they believed this exam would test the quality of the "engineers" they were producing. In reality all they tested was our ability to cram as much as we could fit into our brains prior to the test. By the time I was a senior I had no clue what I had studied in chemistry or biology three years earlier. After reading Ed's story, it sounds like his PE exams were exactly the same. They test the candidate's ability to remember information (itself no mean feat, granted) and then apply that to a test. They say nothing about whether the candidate is a good or even qualified engineer.

If the test is worthless, what might really drive PEs to do good work? I think the fact that PEs can lose their license to practice is a big factor. That happened in the 1981 Hyatt collapse I blogged about earlier. If you're a PE and you lose your license because your project fails, you've lost your ability to make a living. If you're a software developer and your project fails, you continue working or you get a job elsewhere.

Incidentally, the skies over USAFA looked exactly like the photo posted above. Every day. Ok, I'm kidding, but it felt like that. That is a real photo taken 10 August 2004.