2023-05-09
go backDisclaimer 1: This post does not encourage, promote, or seek to normalize the act of using any protected titles illegally in any province, state, territory, or other country. It is simply supposed to provide my thoughts on the the ethics and uses of doing so. Regardless of whether something may be found as ethical or not, the written law is still applicable. I have delivered an opinion but I do not endorse it aside from as a pure idea.
Disclaimer 2: I am not a lawyer and nothing in this post constitutes legal advice. I'm not sure why you would consider me a lawyer, but unfortunately I am not.
A week ago I had a discussion about the ethics and reasons for why an undergraduate student in certain engineering programs might choose to illegally (in Ontario) use the title "Engineer", in the event that it was given to them by an employer during on of their co-ops.
The specific act that makes this illegal in Ontario is called the Professional Engineering Act, which created Professional Engineers Ontario and gave it the power and legal ability to impose a fine on those who misrepresent themselves as professional engineers.
The relevant section for this discussion is below:
Every person who is not a holder of a licence or a temporary licence and who,
uses the title “professional engineer” or “ingénieur” or an abbreviation or variation thereof as an occupational or business designation;
- uses the title “engineer” or an abbreviation of that title in a manner that will lead to the belief that the person may engage in the practice of professional engineering;
uses a term, title or description that will lead to the belief that the person may engage in the practice of professional engineering; or
uses a seal that will lead to the belief that the person is a professional engineer,
is guilty of an offence and on conviction is liable for the first offence to a fine of not more than $10,000 and for each subsequent offence to a fine of not more than $25,000.
R.S.O. 1990, c. P.28, s. 40 (2); 2001, c. 9, Sched. B, s. 11 (59).
At face value, the act prohibits using the title "engineer" in a way that leads to the belief that the person using it is a professional engineer.
To be certain we understand what a professional engineer is, let's have a look in the definitions section of the act.
“practice of professional engineering” means any act of planning, designing, composing, evaluating, advising, reporting, directing or supervising that requires the application of engineering principles and concerns the safeguarding of life, health, property, economic interests, the public welfare or the environment, or the managing of any such act; (“exercice de la profession d’ingénieur”)
It's pretty clear to see that this applies pretty generally to most, if not all, roles that we traditionally call engineering. You can argue for software engineering and disciplines that don't directly deal with something that's obviously tangible to be considered perhaps "not engineering", but I see it as having a pretty sizeable impact on humanity.
I think the reason we classically consider civil engineering or environmental engineering as being professional engineering comes down to the fact that the largest clients for both are, in some structure, either the government itself, or companies under very strong supervision by the government.
The classic touchstone for this is the Quebec Bridge collapse, occuring in August 29th of 1907 and then September 11th of 1916. To my knowledge, and according to this article, it remains the most deadly (in terms of casualties) bridge collapse in Canadian history. The reason for the collapse comes down to the dead load applied on the structure. For those not in the know, the dead load refers to the latent weight of a structure that it has and addition weights from things that will not change over time. The main dead load for this bridge was its own weight, but additional things like decorations or lights also count as a dead load.
I'm not studying a very physical engineering subdiscipline, so admittedly I can't offer too much comment about the specifics of collapse, but the liability issue comes down to the fact that calculations done by the initial engineering team weren't checked during construction and were only valid for a smaller dead load.
The result of this was that a Royal Commission by the federal government that found that two engineers, Theodore Cooper and Peter L. Szlapka, were those guilty of the bridge failure. From what is understood, neither of them faced any penalties.
Your commisioners find:
(a) The collapse of the Quebec bridge resulted from the faiure of the lower chords in the anchor arm near the main pier. The failure of these chords was due to their defective design.
(b) The stresses that caused the failure were not due to abnormal weather conditions or accident, but were such as might be expected in the regular course of erection.
(c) The design of the chords that failed was made by Mr. P. L. Szlapka, the designing engineer of the Phoenix Bridge Company.
(d) The design was examined and officially approved by Mr. Theodore Cooper, consulting engineer of the Quebec Bridge and Railway Company.
(e) The failure cannot be attributed directly to any cuase other than errors in judgement on the part of these two engineers.
There is more on file, but this is really all the essentially information found inside the conclusions to the Royal Commission. In essence, it marked a moment where the oversight of engineers lacked
We can conclude that it is important to actually have a licensing mechanism for engineers and ensure that we treat it as a generally licensed profession. Now, abstractly we would really wish that everyone who works on dangerous things would be licensed, but that isn't the case. Understandably, it's not often terribly profitable to have red tape when you are used to having none. For example, it would arguably be important for those working at large hedge funds, banks, and other financial organizations to take an oath to avoid causing harm as a result of their decisions.
We know this is not the case at all. Now, you can argue with me on this point, but the actions taken by those at Lehman Brothers that lead up to the 2008 financial crash, were most certainly not ones that were directly aiming for a general wellbeing of people.
It's also clear that accredited people can and have been inept at their job. Medical doctors go through an unpleasant amount of schooling and accreditation, all for some of them to end up with malpractice charges.
In a general case, we can agree that accreditation and making ethical oaths is a generally good thing for public wellbeing, but it isn't a silver bullet.
We use words every day to communicate different things and with varying degrees. No one, including me, is ever going to really be able to agree on what is an okay usage of it. For some people, using crass language is considered acceptable, and for others it represents something fundamentally wrong.
Let's consider a brief example. For emphasis, we often will say "I'm starving" to communicate that we are quite hungry. Usually this does not literally imply that we are starving. Thus, we can conclude that words have different levels of acceptability depending on context and company.
Let's make this a bit more specific to the problem. I'm sure those reading this are already aware of some common exceptions that fly in spite of the PEO upholding a promise to pursue legal action. Common examples include audio engineers (sometimes known as producers), combat engineers, and locomotive engineers.
None of these positions require you to be a Professional Engineer. Perhaps there are some benefits for being a combat engineer in terms of CAF payscale, but it is not a requirement of the position to be formally a professional engineer.
I don't see it reasonable to try to argue that really any sort of engineering student is incapable of doing immense hard. Even a software engineer is capable of immense evil through rootkits, spyware, and malicious code. Frankly, SWE jobs probably do cause the most damage to broader society, seeing as though they're implementing things that are used by a massive group of people.
That said, it's worth understanding that tech generally doesn't have strong morals and the requirement to actually follow ethical guidelines would likely not bode well for actually being able to be emplyoyed in the software engineering field in general. Tech already resists censorship and regulation in subtle ways, so creating a class of people who are legally required to exercise professional judgement is fundamentally a poor idea from perspective of employment.
Now, as for the actual situation, the number of people who graduated ECE in 2022 who are certain that they will pursue a P.Eng post graduation are roughly 5% of respondents.
It's not even particularly unreasonable given the job market widely having no interest in software developers possessing a P.Eng. A simple search on LinkedIn, Indeed, or Google proves that there are copius amounts of "Software Engineer" jobs that require no engineering degree, much less an actual P.Eng.
The truth of the matter is that it's perhaps not accurate to describe the average developer. Engineering is somewhat cheapened when used to describe the process of fumbling around with React to design a website. Arguably there's some necessity in engineering being a precise and mathematical practice that requires understanding what happens at many different levels. Consider the civil engineer - they need to understand materials chemistry to really be able to make some comment on the state of a structure. The average "software engineer" is, in reality, not concerned with actual implementation as much as having something that works. At risk of sounding like a delusional person, consider that simple applications like Visual Studio Code, Slack, or Spotify are so abstracted from the hardware that they run inside the Chromium browser but packaged as their own app.
In my mind, this is something that we cannot reasonably call engineering.
Now, with all this thought out of the way, let's get down to the real core of the situation. Regardless of what is technically true, the tech industry will happily gobble up delusional perspectives and proudly use them. Look at AR for example. Broadly speaking, AR is an extremely over-hyped part of technology. The idea of spending time and effort to build a system that views the world, does some computation, and then spits out and image on top of it is ridiculous!
Would it be fun to have an AR world? Sure! Is it at all useful to the point where Google should have been willing to lose what some estimate was over 100 million dollars on? No! If you're finding yourself believing that it was a good use of development given the time, consider all the other common issues with your devices. Would longer batteries have been a better idea? Perhaps reducing the environmental cost of computation?
Big tech doesn't care about reality. Big tech is in it to win it - and sometimes that takes breaks in the truth to sound one way on the hopes that it will improve certain qualities. I don't see this as fundamentally evil either! Google, Meta, and Apple are all motivated to try to deliver regular profits and the chance of a moonshot.
So then, why should we opt to use something less fashionable like "programmer" or "software developer" when "software engineer" is an option? Companies are already willing to flout the law without (to my knowledge), almost any intervention by PEO.
For those concerned that PEO is going to hunt you down, keep in mind that the majority of "software engineers" in Canada aren't even working towards an engineering degree. Most of them will have a degree that is ostensibly not engineering and yet they will label themselves a software engineer on their resume. There's a lot of cases for PEO to get before they get around to you.
After all, if you're used to the tech grift so far, then why be concerned about a little bit of beneficial diction?