As a licensed professional engineer, I find the effort exerted by various state and provincial licensing bodies to regulate the use of the term 'engineer' a bit tiresome. Yes, it's important to regulate the practice of engineering, but unlike some other types of professionals engineers rarely if ever offer their services to Joe Public. It's not like we have guys putting up billboards on the side of the highway advertising their services as an engineer.
In every context where the services of a PE / PEng (Canada) are truly required, no one will be relying on that person's email signature or business card, they will be asking for the relevant documents to be signed and sealed.
Licensing boards would do well to devote more effort to regulating large engineering firms which often play fast and loose with the rules, hiring cheaper, unlicensed people to do most of their work and then have one or two PEs seal all of it with minimal review.
Last time I had a discussion about this my put was that licensing is an archaic way of doing things.
In short the idea is we trust the PE's signature that everything is copacetic. In more modern fields like automotive, aerospace and software engineering that idea is laughable. Everything is about process, audit and testing.
It all comes down to insurance. If your building collapses, the insurance company will want to know if you did every reasonable thing possible to prevent it before they pay out on your policy. One of those things is making sure that the person who designed the building knew what they were doing, i.e. were they a licensed engineer.
I think most product companies are essentially self-insured. If Ford releases the Pinto and they get sued, they're paying the settlements themselves, not filing an insurance claim. So they are free to use whatever method they like to verify the competence of their employees.
> It all comes down to insurance. If your building collapses, the insurance company will want to know if you did every reasonable thing possible to prevent it before they pay out on your policy. One of those things is making sure that the person who designed the building knew what they were doing, i.e. were they a licensed engineer.
That has nothing to do with the law, though. Ie. any insurance company ought to be able to decide for itself what qualifies as "engineer". There's no need for the state to define this and sue people -- the insurance company can simply refuse to sell an insurance unless the work was done by people considered, by the insurance company, as "engineers".
A law defining what make the difference between an engineer and a professional engineer though reduces rriction in that context by creating a shared definition so instead of every insurance client having to provide the documentation that their eng was a p. eng (according to that insurance company's definition) both the customer and the insurance company can just refer to the licensing board to check.
The biggest issue in this case is that the state was using it punatively against a person who was not providing a p eng sign off or advertising services as a p eng. Having a regulatory shared definition is fine and helps smooth commerce.
Many places have an exemption for manufactured goods that are subject to testing. So for instance, a device doesn't have to be designed by a licensed engineer if it meets and is verified by testing to meet CSA standards.
But if you want to use something that's not CSA, then it does need to be reviewed and signed off by an engineer.
A home's electrical design doesn't have to be signed off by an engineer, but it has to meet code and be inspected.
If it doesn't meet code and you want an exemption (for instance because you are doing something that wasn't anticipated by the code), then you need an engineer to sign off confirming that what you're doing is safe and truly requires an exemption.
Yes, for attritional claims they “self-insure” (often through a captive or equivalent.) But for large claims they buy insurance. This is usually done from global reinsurers.
How do you propose municipal planning departments process, audit, and test the thousands of building permit drawings they receive every year? Have a staff of hundreds of engineers of their own? The professional reliance model seems to work well enough, but that isn't to say it is the optimal model out there.
I feel like that's something that could be at least in part be automated by a computer. If everyone is following a standard you should be able to feed the data in and start doing pass/fail tests on requirements. I assume that's what people who sign off on plans kind of already do anyway.
The engineer's work is largely edge cases that don't fit into prescriptive code. Ie, that is substantially the system in place: We have a set of things that can be done without an engineer because they were already designed and approved by a group of engineers, and for everything else it is bespoke engineering.
And how do you know the process, auditing and testing was done? With documentation signed by someone who can verify this and is legally liable if it wasn't done properly.
When I worked at Raytheon, there were no PEs n staff signing off on process documents or conducting audits of our design, manufacturing, or testing processes. Processes were developed in accordance with relevant ISO/IEEE/ASME/whatever standards, and these standards were periodically audited by external people certified by the corresponding standards body. While many of the older engineers had PEs, I do not recall any position that required one.
As for legal liability, that falls primarily with the company. The chances that an individual is going to be held legally liable for a process failure in a corporation is very low, and whether or not that person has a PE will be irrelevant.
And that's great when you have Raytheon's reputstion, clout, budget and bargaining power with insurance companies. If you want to start an engineering firm, I expect that having an accredited professional engineer on staff to ensure these processes are respected or the work meets certain standards will significantly affect your premiums. I wouldn't underestimate these costs, particularly for a new company.
I can only speak for the area where I am licensed - British Columbia - but the presence of a professional engineer's seal on something should mean more than "this person thinks it's OK". It is supposed to mean:
1. This person has performed the work that went into this plan/design/report or, if someone else performed it, the signing person carefully verified every important aspect of the work
2. If they used software to perform calculations, they have designed a reasonable method to check and verify the output of that software, either by using selected hand-calculations or comparing to another, independent, software system
3. They have employed a quality assurance process that is suitable for the type of work being done, which may include peer review, non destructive testing, testing to failure of a sample, etc.
4. If field work is being sealed, the PEng has personally verified the field work, or provided detailed specifications for another qualified person to do quality assurance on the field work
Now whether most PEngs really follow these "best practices" is an entirely different story. And yes, for fields that often involve very complex systems, the idea of any one single person meeting the quality management guidelines to place a professional seal on, say, an entire 787 aircraft, doesn't make sense. And when those systems also have life safety implications, it makes sense to test rigorously wherever possible.
In many fields, professional engineers are effectively delegated the authority of government under a system known as "professional reliance". Rather than the city government hiring hundreds of people to review the plans of every building, they simply require developers to have a professional engineer certify that the plans meet the building code. This strikes a balance between the city having to review everything (and the associated increase in costs), and the developer being able to tick the box saying everything is fine with no real accountability beyond their numbered company that is owned by another numbered company in the Cayman Islands.
I studied a degree called "Software Engineering" and am acredited by the Australian Institute of Engineers (the first, and AFAIK, only, Software degree that is certified).
Working in Canada where my degree was not certified, all the PEng people would get seriously uptight if I even said "I studied Engineering" or "I have a bachelor of Engineering".
> Working in Canada where my degree was not certified
If they have an engineering conference in Canada, and a notable engineering expert comes from abroad to speak but isn't from a Canadian certified school (perhaps they're from a British one instead) do they get uptight about that as well?
At some point they must accept that non-Canadian-certified people can be engineers as well?
In Quebec (not sure about the rest of Canada), you can't call yourself engineer if not a member of the ordre des ingénieurs. You can sign b.eng, but not eng. You can say you have a Batchelor of engineering, but not that you are an engineer.
I remember there was a case where an American academic headed a scientific organization in Germany but was told he couldn’t call himself Dr. because his doctorate was from America.
The issue here is probably more that software engineering isn't considered to be engineering in Canada. If a notable historian from a country where they call historians engineers came to the country to speak, people probably would get uptight about that.
>> The issue here is probably more that software engineering isn't considered to be engineering in Canada
By whom? Canadian software engineers, other types of Canadian engineers, or by some professional engineering body that's trying to protect their profession?
I am actually a Software Engineering Undergraduate Student in Canada. We are real engineers! We get licenced the same way through graduating from an accredited program, getting the 4 years of experience and writing an ethics exam.
In Canada engineer is like lawyer. You can specialize in a certain part of law (e.g. patent, corporate, criminal). just like you specialize in certain fields (e.g. aerospace, mechanical, geomagnetic, biomed). What matters in both cases is being given a license.
I didn't know about that. Is the license legally required to be hired for all programming jobs, or just for jobs related to specific fields and government?
I had assumed by everyone. As an American software engineer, I don't consider software engineering to be engineering because we don't have a professional body or licensing or standards. I didn't know Canada was any different.
> Working in Canada where my degree was not certified, all the PEng people would get seriously uptight if I even said "I studied Engineering" or "I have a bachelor of Engineering".
As a Canadian engineering graduate myself, I don't think that's true. Saying you studied engineering is fine, that's literally what the degree is. Calling yourself an engineer is a different story, and that requires more work. It's like calling yourself a doctor without a doctorate. Notice how I didn't call myself an engineer, and that's because I didn't get my PEng.
I studied engineering in Germany. There's no such thing as a PEng in Germany -- the only thing is that the title of Dipl.-Ing. (equivalent to MEng), which was the culmination of my studies, is protected.
How does it make you feel for me to claim I'm an engineer?
(BTW, I get seriously uptight at all the web designers who like to call themselves engineers :-) )
> (BTW, I get seriously uptight at all the web designers who like to call themselves engineers :-) )
I feel similarly to you, but would extend it to cover most software development, period. With feet in multiple traditional engineering disciplines, I don't see the majority of software development as coming close to the bar of engineering (though some certainly does). And I don't mean that in the sense of licensure, nor am I merely trying to be snooty. But to hear the software world co-opt "engineering" to mean "technical work" is grating.
My computer engineering degree included Chemistry, Physics, Mechanical Engineering (statics/dynamics) Multivariate Calculus, Differential Equations / Linear Algebra, as well as Humanities (writing, history, art) in addition to software, hardware, electronics... Am I not coming close to the "bar of engineering"?
You can boil engineering down (maybe a bit much, but bear with me) to: plan, execute, measure, adjust. The difference between software /programming/ and software /engineering/ is that programming often stops after execute, and hands measure to someone else maybe, whereas a software engineer is constantly measuring what they are doing and trying to understand why it may be deviating from plan, and how to make it better in the future.
To wit, you don't need software engineers to build you a web application, but you had better have them working on your file system.
None of the things you listed would seem to indicate anything about your ability to employ a rigorous approach to software development equivalent to what a credentialed civil engineer does with roads.
A civil engineer is not credentialed because they took physics and DiffEq. They are that because their field has defined a body of knowledge and rigor that has been shown to adequately protect the public within a narrow band of services.
I am not aware of any such effort anywhere in software, which is why many engineers consider the whole notion of “software engineering” to be a farce.
> I am not aware of any such effort anywhere in software, which is why many engineers consider the whole notion of “software engineering” to be a farce.
The Rust Evangelism Strikeforce is working hard to change that.
> My computer engineering degree included Chemistry, Physics, Mechanical Engineering (statics/dynamics) Multivariate Calculus, Differential Equations / Linear Algebra, as well as Humanities (writing, history, art) in addition to software, hardware, electronics... Am I not coming close to the "bar of engineering"?
I'm not making a point about degrees and coursework covered per se, more so about the practice of the profession. Of course, education prepares one for practice, so they are very linked.
I think the practice of computer engineering straddles the line more between engineering and craftsmanship than does say typical software development which is largely (though as I noted before, not entirely) in the craftsmanship camp. For what it's worth, I have a Computer Engineering degree as well.
> You can boil engineering down (maybe a bit much, but bear with me) to: plan, execute, measure, adjust.
I get your gist, but it misses some essential elements. Engineering is about understanding your objectives/requirements/constraints well and ensuring that what you implement satisfies those while being correct/sound. Of course, there is almost inevitably a circular dependence between the understanding of objectives/requirements/constraints and correct implementation.
If soundness is trumped by other considerations, e.g., "development velocity", developer availability, convenience of tooling, etc., I would say you are not practicing engineering. It's not that most software development sets out to implement bugs or design flaws, it's that there's an irreconcilable difference between the mindset that treats their elimination or preclusion as a first-order consideration and lets the development approach fall out accordingly, vs. choosing a development approach and then trying to weed out soundness issues after implementation. The heated arguments in favor of continuing to develop mass-deployed or high-stakes systems in languages like C or C++, or weakly-typed languages shows the strong bent of the software development world toward craftsmanship over engineering. It's one thing when those are the only tools available; it's another thing when there are viable options that force more correctness yet people can't get over how unencumbered they feel when they go the unsafe route.
I recognize these statements probably offend, but my point is not to troll with a polemic. It's to say that software is a new technical vista compared to traditional engineering disciplines. It provides a kind of power and speed of system implementation radically unavailable in the physical realm. Our ability to construct software systems far outstrips the allotted time, and often until recently the ability, to reason about them.
This is definitely changing, and the work going into enabling soundness-by-construction through tools accessible to any competent developer is worthy of innumerable plaudits. I think we are heading toward most software development as engineering, but we are far from it today. The daily news of "hacked" systems and the never-ending stream of "system security updates" is proof.
> If soundness is trumped by other considerations, e.g., "development velocity", developer availability, convenience of tooling, etc., I would say you are not practicing engineering
I think you could argue they might be engaged in other forms of non-recognized engineering (like process engineering), but I agree that software is not what they're engineering.
I am seriously curious, what is the difference between e.g. an mechanical engineer designing a new machine and a person designing a new software system that is intended to be maintained for at least 10 years by various teams? Is there some sort of bonus just because it's physical vs virtual?
> Is there some sort of bonus just because it's physical vs virtual?
No, it's not about a "bonus" because it's physical. erikpukinskis [1] and blihp [2] captured essential reasons for the differences in their comments, and I did so in my response to yc-krain [3]. I mean this in no way condescendingly, but if the bulk of one's technical experience is all in software with no deep exposure to the engineering lifecycle in the physical realm, it could be hard to grok the underlying theme of rigor that these comments get at.
I think it's the rigor of the field. The general expectation is that a mechanical, or any other type of engineer, will bring to the table some minimum set of skills and knowledge that other engineers in the same field possess. This is not true in computing since so many people entered the field from so many vectors. Not to mention there's still a hell of a lot of snake oil being peddled because there's so much money in the field of computing.
For example: one can't be certain that someone with a Computer Science degree even knows how to program or has any other specific knowledge or skills. Or that someone supposedly with X years of experience with Y understands Y at all vs. just repeating tasks learned by rote. Or that someone who went to a Z bootcamp can actually do anything useful with/in Z. Maybe someday we'll get there, but it's still a long ways off.
That’s bonkers! Doctor was originally a title for academics before medics borrowed it. I think medics without an MD or PhD shouldn’t be using the title. What country is that in?
That link isn't very clear. Plus it's only Quebec.
I did a little Googling and in Ontario there are exceptions for flight engineer, train engineer, sound engineer, aircraft maintenance engineer, operating engineer, stationary engineer, and hoisting engineer.
I am from Quebec, so this what I know. The link says you can't and ask media to stop doing it. It also says that the train engineer union could keep his name because it existed before the law.
If you study engineering. You will probably end up with an engineering degree (something like a doctorate for doctors) which makes completely legit to call yourself an engineer.
There are plenty of people with PEng licenses that have never done a day of fundamental engineering work in their life (e.g. people doing project management or technical sales). These people usually know what they don't know, and won't try to - for instance - sign off on the plans for a steam turbine, so they are largely harmless. If you work at a large technical company, getting your PEng can be mostly a form of credentialing that your employer pays for and may come with a small pay increase. Lots of companies that employ PEngs (and indeed demand the credential) don't actually do any engineering work - only management of engineering work by contractors - so there's no way for their employees to properly build their capabilities as engineers.
It would annoy me if someone without any engineering education or experience tried to pass themselves off as an engineer in a way that exaggerated their competence, but if a guy from Iran with 20 years solid experience as an engineer who hasn't yet jumped through the excessively many hoops to obtain a PEng in Canada wants to write "engineer" in his email signature, that's fine with me. It's the term that best represents his competencies. The only limitation is that he won't be able to take responsibility for plans or designs without an actual license.
Maybe a PEng takes more work than a PE, but a PE is not "way more work" than a Bachelor's. It basically just involves doing your job well enough for three years to get three recommendations from PEs and remaining sharp enough on academic subjects to pass an exam at the end of that period. I didn't bother mainly because I neglected to take the FE before I graduated.
A professional engineer has to pass a pretty rigorous test that takes every bit of 8 hours for most folks. I studied for hundreds of hours for mine (not kidding) and it took me two tries to pass. I know great engineers who are trying for the sixth time. Getting an engineering degree is really hard at most colleges. Passing the Fundamentals of Engineering exam is also challenging, but a joke compared to the P.E. exam. A professional engineer has both passed that test and worked for usually four years in industry according to most state laws and can testify in court as an expert. The commenter you quoted likely isn't being snarky, but trying to point that out. If Sweden has a completely different set of requirements, I would similarly not be able to practice in the same professional context there.
This was rotten of Oregon, but there are generally laws like this to make sure everyone knows what to expect from an engineer. Of course it looks rediculous that a Swedish engineer wasn't allowed to point out a flawed system (I agree it is a violation of free speech), but they also can't take his background at face value, just like someone with a medical degree from Cuba probably can't practice medicine in the United States without going through licensing and taking classes to make sure the degrees truly are equivalent.
Let's not oversell the PE or the FE: I took both drunk and completed them in under 3 hours each.
The true point of being a professional engineer is that you've satisfied the MINIMUM requirements to be licensed and, therefore, you are licensed by the state to sign off on documents within what you consider your expertise. It relies on you to make that determination with the understanding that you should know better, recognizing the legal and professional ramifications if you practice outside your expertise.
I disagree with the Oregon ruling: holding yourself out as an engineer without licensure is not acceptable and should not be encouraged. It creates confusion amongst the public about what a licensed engineer is and who to trust.
The guy could have easily put out his findings as an interested party or something without trying to invoke the goodwill that people like you and I have put so much effort into engendering.
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.
There isn't one legal definition and it was being used to silence a member of the public pointing out that they are stealing from the public by designing unsafe traffic lights.
Some clients of certain kinds of engineering demand this certification. But not all clients, and not all engineering fields. A post-academic license doesn’t an engineer make. It’s like saying you can’t call yourself tech support without getting a Red Hat Certification (ignoring the fact that it’s easier to get a PE paper than an RHCE)— no it’s an unfortunately named certification lacking which just precludes you from certain jobs requiring a PE.
Don’t undersell it either. The minimum, as you pointed out, is safe. Your capitalization implies “it’s barely acceptable” and any engineer that has passed those tests would know this.
My capitalization means exactly what it says: someone with a license has met the minimum requirements from the state. Nothing else can be garnered from someone possessing a license.
The minimum requirements have, historically, resulted in engineers who put out public facing designs that, more often than not, do not bring harm to the public.
As someone who “has passed those tests” and been practicing for almost a decade, I can tell you first hand that sometimes the guy with a license who is actually at “the minimum” does not always put out something that is safe.
There's no need to put emphasis on it - unless your real motivation was to suggest the test is a joke. Which your claim to have been drunk and finished in nearly a third of the suggested time also implies.
It indicates they're not some random. (Or someone without conventional engineering education.) I guess an undergrad degree, a few years of experience, and the ability to pass an academic test does indicate at least some basic background but probably not a whole lot more.
I have an engineering degree (masters level), but most places don't allow me to call myself an "engineer". I also have a PhD and same stands for "doctor". Oh well...
The funny thing about the medical community trying to monopolize the use of the term "doctor" is that physicians are rarely actually doctors themselves. While MD programs require a bachelor degree and certain prerequisite course work, the MD is the first degree someone can earn in medicine. Traditionally, the first earned medical degrees were bachelor degrees (MBBS) and that's a more honest way of doing things. Same thing with the JD (law). It's a renamed LLB undergraduate degree rather than a real doctorate.
occupational licensing and the laws around them are what keep many people who go to prison without a good means to obtain a well paying job. it also keeps many in lower income strata because even simple jobs are overly regulated protecting entrenched concerns; read : hair and nail care and even interior decorating in some jurisdictions.
yet there are defenders who will pop up with any threat to the licensing by citing extreme examples but most of this is to protect the businesses who both "train" to meet the licensing requirements as well as those who hire because it becomes an expensive business to compete in
Yes. Back some 20 years ago, I switched majors, spent another 1.5 years and $15k for a degree accreditation eligible for PE.
I'm fine with forbiding speech regarding life/safety impact like shouting "fire" and protecting the use of PE for liability and public safety reasons, and letting anyone call themselves a hacker, engineer or whatever else floats their day. To be clear: there ought to be a level of professional rigor where lives are on the line, but otherwise it's caveat hiring manager.
Aren't you forgetting liability? It's not exactly in the PEs interest to sign off on shoddy work as they can be found liable if it does hit the fan. And the consequences could be pretty severe.
At least where I am, for an engineer to be held liable their conduct needs to meet the standard of negligence. And realistically, enforcement action only commences when the consequences are catastrophic: someone loses their life or severe property damage occurs.
The work merely being of poor quality is almost never going to give rise to enforcement action. If you design a crappy drainage system for a road and it double the owner's maintenance expenses because it keeps washing out, you aren't going to get sued.
I once worked in the live entertainment industry. We often had engineers sign off on stage/tower structures. When they got the math wrong things fell on heads. Our insurance demanded licensed engineers. Anyone using that term, professing, to be an engineer better be one.
This case essentially removes engineer from the list of recognized professions. That club now only belongs to the doctors and lawyers. Even hairdressers cannot call themselves such without state recognition.
No - the judge affirmed that the state can still control who can call themselves a "professional engineer" or "licensed professional engineer" - but allowed anyone to claim to be an "engineer" ... it's a situation akin to being an "accredited teacher" with a teaching credential compared to all of us who teach at one time or another
I guess anyone can call themselves a doctor then, and we'll just have to call proper doctors "professional doctors" or "licensed professional doctors".
> Our insurance demanded licensed engineers. Anyone using that term, professing, to be an engineer better be one.
The guy didn't claim he was licensed. All he said was "I'm an engineer". All the court said was "He can say he's an engineer".
This doesn't sound very problematic to me. Like, presumably you'd ask where they were licensed, right? You wouldn't just accept anyone who said they were an engineer, and then rely on the state to issue a $500 fine to anyone who dared use the "E" word without being licensed in the US?
I think instead he's making a joke about locomotive engineers. Which is actually a good point, but marred by couple issues. First, the "engineer" is the person who drives the train, rather than the person feeding the fire. Second, the term is only frequently used in English speaking North America. Further description here:
Could be, although I think of that as a nautical term. For example when they were talking recently about the coal bunker fire on the Titantic, they said that two stokers per every shift were delegated to shovel the bunker that had the burning coal.
Completely disagree. It says he can call himself an engineer in a non-professional context.
Having a ChBE BS, I am an engineer (although no longer working as one). I am not a Professional Engineer (not a licensed PE). There’s a difference - doesn’t mean I should not be able to call myself an engineer, and I’m sure others w engineering degrees would agree
I am also an engineer and approach the world with an engineering mindset. And I would never use "Engineer" as part of my title. For me, once it becomes a title/capitalized, it's no longer an adjective but a designation.
My first initial is D and I use that instead of my first name. When people address me as "Dr Casey" I correct them on that too.
Engineer is an incredibly widely-used term as part of titles. In addition to SWEs etc., you've got sales engineers, systems engineers, field engineers, etc. When I was in the oil business there were titles like mud engineer (which people joked should have been called mud salesmen). The majority of these people don't have engineering degrees and have never worked in what most would consider an engineering role.
Non-sarcastic question: Everyone at my company has "Software Development Engineer" on their title if that's their role. That's a capitol E. What's your thoughts on that?
In every context where the services of a PE / PEng (Canada) are truly required, no one will be relying on that person's email signature or business card, they will be asking for the relevant documents to be signed and sealed.
Licensing boards would do well to devote more effort to regulating large engineering firms which often play fast and loose with the rules, hiring cheaper, unlicensed people to do most of their work and then have one or two PEs seal all of it with minimal review.