If he were holding himself out as a "professional engineer," I'd absolutely agree with you. However, there are entire fields of engineering that have largely ignored the PE. Good luck finding a PE, for example, to work under if you're an electrical engineer to even be eligible to sit for the PE exam. I don't think such engineers are any less engineers because they lack a PE.
Yeah. In the US, I believe the software engineering PE is actually being discontinued after this year.
I got an Engineer-in-Training certificate out of school (basically taking a GRE-type exam) because, in the field I was working in at the time, senior engineers got PEs so they could sign off on blueprints for regulatory agencies. And, in due course, I would have gotten one.
But anyone who thinks there's something special about working for a few years in the industry and then taking a few hours of tests... I'm not violently against these types of certifications but they tend to become artificial barriers (degree requirements, specific work experience, and the certification itself) and don't really indicate a lot.
Absolutely there are entire fields that have abandoned licensure or have no real need for licensure. These are usually fields where designs are not public facing or reviewed by a state agency and so no implied liability occurs.
However, I think it is incredibly important to note that the story in question had a guy who was claiming to be an engineer and talking about traffic signal timing. Traffic engineering (and all other subsets of civil engineering) is definitely NOT one of the fields that has abandoned licensure. Civil engineering has the highest percentage of licensure of any engineering discipline that I know of. Anything related to a traffic signal, in my experience, has had to be dual stamped by both a licensed civil engineer for the traffic and electrical engineer for the light.
Sure, traffic engineering requires a stamp. Traffic light timings? That's a little rich considering the guy who created the formula in question was a physicist who never held a PE.
My friend is actually a EE (graduated with him) and he went to work at the highway department as a civil (had a family member that worked there and wanted to stay home). I just remembered that we talked many a moon ago and he told me the traffic light timings were in a table which made zero sense. I believe he changed the timing, but not sure.
This is false. My company has about 200 electrical engineers (I'm one) and there are probably 50 that have a P.E. and many in management...finding someone above you that you've worked for/with is not difficult and I say that as someone whose company puts nearly zero value on it. If I ever change jobs though, it could be valuable. My father is also a EE and his was required to advance.
I'm an electrical engineer, too, and my experience working for small companies in Silicon Valley is that nobody has a PE. Are you by any chance working in power? That's the one place I've commonly seen EE PEs.
