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.
But, if the engineers had engineered the matter properly when it was built, it wouldn't need re-engineered. Make sense?
How sexist of the Houston Chronicle.
How do you admit that you don't know how something works and then simultaneously throw out an attack on "hicks" that do?
If you knew anything about PE's, you'd know that an accredited degree is only PART of being a PE. It includes essentially an apprenticeship of sorts under another PE as well as real engineering training. The object is for "booksmarts" to be augmented with the ethics of experience, something that book learning does not provide.
A graduate with an Electrical Engineering PhD from UTexas is no more automatically a "Professional Engineer" in Texas than a BSEE from Calpoly. That's the law, and it was created for good reason in the civil and mechanical and aerospace industries. Now in the electrical and computer engineering world, it's becoming very important for people building GPS systems and software, for example, that hikers might rely on for safety, that the developer's skillset be licensed.
That said, I think it's unlikely that EE's will pursue their PE nearly as much as their civil and aero cohorts because the job market for it just isn't there.
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.
Try to convince folks the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was a "beta-version"! LOL!
That's right! Not in Texas. That's the law. The primary point of a PE is experience working under the supervision of another PE.
If you worked at SBC on PSTN under a BSEE w/ PE, you might could get licensed.
If you are just out there on your own inventing stuff without any input from anyone else with more experience....that is, especially if you are the brilliant leader of all technologies in Network Security, then you are by definition one of the people that should not refer to themselves as a Professional Engineer. So get over it. In Texas you are not a "Network Engineer." Why would you care?
I have to take issue with that statement - I work in the Medical Device industry - as an engineer, and even though I am not licensed as an 'engineer', I do in fact do engineering work which is heavily regulated by state and federal agencies - hence my job title as 'Engineer'... In my field, it could be very easy to kill a patient on the table if I didn't do my job correctly... If texas doesn't want to consider me an engineer, that's fine - they can kiss my medical device engineering butt...
The point of the Texas Laws is EXACTLY to avoid this!!! Anybody can design and build a bridge. But the State requires any bridge it builds to be done by a PE that has accredited degree and served under the supervision of another PE.
The PE at the end means something, though.
Good point - how many people who can build a bridge have the intelligence and education necessary to design and implement a medical telemetry system that monitors, from the ground, the vital signs (including repiratory, pressure waves and ECGs) of space-walking astronauts in realt-time???
It is if it's a 767 transponder radio. If people's lives depend on an application of scientific principles to solve a problem, then society SHOULD ensure that the people designing such stuff are licensed just like bridges are.
The answer to your assertion, though, is that for stuff besides bridges, the PRODUCTS rather than the "engineers" must be certified. For example, home-stereos -by Federal Law- cannot have exposed high-voltages that can zap you based on Underwriter's Laboratories approval, which is staffed by a bevy of PE's, incidentally.
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