With the advent of AI and potential repercussions, maybe it’s not a bad idea to enforce a P.E. for sensitive or dangerous software. Apparently they tried in 2013, but in a five year period only 81 people took the exam so it was eliminated.
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I’ll note at least for me in my field I have most of the requirements outside of being licensed to be considered an engineer but also my title is silly and used 100% so we can look better in bids to the federal government.
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I have a BS in Computer Engineering. Does that count as training or credentials? Those four years of physics, chemistry, electric circuits and math sure felt like training. Differential equations was just torture.
Edit: I also have a BS in Mathematics. But that is just farting around.
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You know one thing with the recent advent of many folks utilizing ai to make specialized apps is the slow saturation of a bunch of non standard apps that won’t really integrate well in the long run. It’s kind of like the 90s era power builder stuff that was all kind of hodge podged together and when consolidations happened and startups where bought and merged those old systems became massive tech debt often unable to be exported cleanly and carrying data that had long retention periods like tax records or PII cause IT was an extension of finance in that era and hr was the same.
I worry as this continues there will be a a new wave of messy poorly built and optimized stuff that will exist and not be able to be consolidated with single critical functions that will be massive extra overhead and management in the long run.
I think that’s my biggest issue with AI in app building today is it feels familiar and I’m getting ptsd from years of my life being wasted maintaining said tech debt over my career.
I know I kind of harped on this prior but I keep getting ads for building ai apps and they all mention being able to build dedicated applets for specific things like inventory or finance records and it’s triggering me.
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In most states a BS in Engineering just means you need less experience under a PE before you can take the PE exam. A degree in engineering doesn’t actually qualify you to perform engineering services. For that you need a PE stamp. That’s the point. In a field where a teenager can just be good at coding and call themselves an engineer it makes all your hard work to earn a degree carry less weight when you’re both calling yourselves engineer.
I mean your an engineer that vibe codes I somehow trust whatever you make a bit more than a 20 something out if college.
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You are correct and what you are saying mirrors a conversation I had in a meeting today.
Using Claude Opus + Spec + MCP Servers I’ve actually had the AI write some honestly impressive software. Things that work in the corporate space. It is more capable than I gave it credit. I’ll admit that overall I was wrong, with the right set of tasks and using the correct more expensive model, AI can write impressive code. This is stuff I had to figure out on my own because the corporate directive was use it or else, no details, and poor documentation.
What it fails at is standardization. You can literally hand it an existing pipeline and say I want you to use this as your standard, here’s additional documentation on the standard, it will still try to make some other “optimized” version that doesn’t follow the teams existing standards. It might follow 90% of them but it will casually skip stuff you explicitly required. In a company governed strictly by standards this sucks.
You can get paged because your bot decided to randomly skip something and suddenly your pager is aggressively alarming you awake at 2 AM, or worse paging your skip level. Had to make a manual intervention in a pipeline because your AI messed something up? Now you are on a naughty list and have to write to a senior leader saying why you did that.
Add to that, if you give the model the same task 5 times it will also not provide the same results every time. The disregard for standards and unpredictable results makes connecting larger projects together troublesome and more difficult than it should be.
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Rumor mill 10% of corporate staff will be laid off tomorrow in AI driven cuts. Waiting under the dangling sword to see if I’ll escape.
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Not all people with an engineering degree need to be a PE to work as an engineer. I worked at Boeing as an engineer (with a degree, but not a PE). As long as the senior engineer is a PE and signs off on your work, that is OK.
Regarding the video and the airplane design description, designing an airplane is a multi-disciplinary process. There are complex aerodynamic issues to consider and resolve to achieve a workable design from that point of view with a suitable propulsion configuration, all within the constraints of the mission of the aircraft. Then you have the design of the physical structure and structural analysis to determine if what you have configured will be able to withstand the stresses of flight and can it be built within various manufacturing constraints - cost, practicality, ability, materials. Then you need to consider the human factor issues such as how you build it, how to configure the human interaction issues.
For the bridge (as well as the airplane), no one in the world is going to start from the ground up to develop code to analyze the structural analysis aspects of any design. There are extensive established libraries of validated code widely used and accepted in industry for this purpose.
All endeavors of this type require large amounts of human experience and judgement to put the results of all the various analysis segments together to achieve the final goal within the constraints of cost and the mission.
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My brother works same place as you different segment and is safe this round only because he’s on medical leave at the moment and legally they can’t touch him till he’s back but that doesn’t mean his exact role has to exist when he returns.
His team is rumored to get cut this week too so i hear you hopefully you make it through
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This honestly was an issue pre AI vibe coding. Coders who had little experience right out of college coming in using stack over flow or some other public repo to just copy paste code with no idea what dependencies they had. Constant security issues and one of the reasons for the memes around the internet being built on a handful of public packages. Allot of that behavior was driven by crunches and mgmt trying to force more output with less resources.
For the PE discussion I guess that’s very similar to allot of stuff like in the hedge fund space there’s often only one or two registered traders at a quant shop and the rest of the “analysts” running the trade desk are just babysitting an algorithm (this is considered kosher to the SEC) Only the large national and international firms have floors worth of dedicated traders and even then most of them are script kitties claiming to be “data scientists” to massage python scripts into something that beats the S&P (most don’t)
IT and federal contracting in general is similar in that usually you’ll have a bid with a certification requirement and the firm will have one or two senior fully certified engineers with a bunch of analysts (or whatever made up title the firm wants to give them) assigned to each program that report under them that do the actual work and get it reviewed by the certified and cleared engineer.
In my role I’m essentially a Subject matter expert and In that review and approval type of position but thankfully I’m assigned to the corporate enterprise and get consulted out to programs instead of being assigned directly to a contract which shelters me from the politics and funding junk of being a contractor. as long as my firms stock price stays stable I’m golden. (If not I’m in the same boat as @AudreySickburn wondering if my time has come)
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16,000 layoffs this morning. I appear to be safe, I haven’t gotten the text or email and my understanding was everyone was cut via email or text message around 3:00 am pst today.
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Imagine getting fired by text message at 3 in the morning. This place really has gone downhill.
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I also do engineering work that is reviewed and stamped by an engineer. Once the engineer puts their stamp on it, then it becomes their work and they accept 100% of the liability. It is in fact illegal for someone to say they are an engineer and accept payment for the work if they are not a PE. Thats the point I’m making. Software development is the only industry were literally anyone can call themselves an engineer and accept payment for work without any particular certification. There was actually a giant legal battle in Canada about exactly this topic.
As for your description of how an airplane is designed, I’m not sure how it pertains to my comment. The guy in the video says that the code AI generated is like a hallucinogenic airplane. What I’m saying is a hallucinogenic airplane is working perfectly fine for my needs and is greatly increasing my productivity. I don’t need AI to build anything that’s putting peoples life or property at risk. I understand that things are being built by AI that are sensitive and obviously they need to be carefully reviewed by a qualified person. Maybe there should be something like a PE for computers so we can determine who is in fact qualified to perform critical work in the field.
This entire AI thread reminds me of people discussing the internet and computers in the 90’s. I remember folks saying that the internet or a computer will never be able to do this or work for that. I’ll wager my entire yoyo collection that the same is going to be true for AI. In 20 years it will be ubiquitous and doing infinitely more things than we could have ever imagined. By then AI doing complex coding tasks will be child’s play.
Is that not how you end a relationship properly?
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Agreed on it being ubiquitous and eventually it’ll compile standards and be create thing beyond what we can imagine. but I also imagine like the 90s internet boom there will be a large amount of technical debt in the form of bad standards and or non standard apps and bad code. Same thing different era is what I’m going with. We have a new thing and it’s great but we will have allot of growing pain that in already seeing similarities to what has happened in the past.
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Apparently if you work in HR it’s standard practice.
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Seems they took a page from high school dating, it was fun see ya later. It’s only years of your life, right? Cold robotic text at 3am is perfect human resources procedure.
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For some context my father in law is a power builder dev. He built many bespoke non standards apps for federal agencies in the 80-90s today he is partly retired and takes on work moving those sane apps he built to standard platforms decades later because no one new to the industry even can read the code base or gets his these old apps function.
I guess my worry is will AI eventually get smart enough to cleanup its own past agent versions messes in the future or will that be a group of people trying to debug garbage code made today to standardize things 20 years from now.
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Hope your brother makes it through okay. I got an email from the HR SVP saying that for those who are affected they get 90 days to find a new role within the company then severance based on tenure.
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