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This is such a tired take.

Aerospace engineers who build rockets do not have some certification body allowing them to be called engineers. Same with most electrical engineers working on almost everything.

If you think a government deciding who is an engineer is a *good* thing then maybe you should ask yourself why the United States which doesn't require this for the two non-software engineering disciplines has the best engineers in the world.



> has the best engineers in the world

Really? What evidence do you have for that? Are you saying that companies like Airbus, Mercedes-Benz, Ferrari, ASML, Leonardo, Rolls-Royce, Dassault Aviation, Toyota, Bosch, Komatsu, Siemens, ABB, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Alstom, Vestas, Samsung, Sony, Hyundai Heavy Industries, Mitsubishi Shipbuilding etc. don't have world class engineers?


The United States has the best engineers because it pays the best. Good engineers from other places move here to capture some of that. Obviously strict licensing laws would get in the way of that.

Outside of some exceptions which don't really exist in the US (shipbuilding and heavy forging) the American companies in those industries are highly competitive and often market share leaders.


> The United States has the best engineers because it pays the best

Nope. There are many counter examples of companies being world leading without paying world leading salaries to their engineers.

It's a big mistake to believe that the only thing all engineers care about is $. Yes it is true for some engineers but not for all.


It's true for most engineers (most human beings, really) and not by a small margin.


Annoyingly, the US government still sometimes does.

If you want to take the patent agent exam, your CS degree has to come from an ABET-accredited program, though many of the very good ones aren't (Stanford, CMU).

Likewise, federal jobs also sometimes seem to want accreditation but not always.




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