I'm not saying there's anything unique about the case, but, I don't understand this comment or how applies to my comment. What is a "poorly written description"? what I said in my most recent comment? The hypothetical comment that I claim to be infracting the law? What the defendant said?
I'm well aware the TYPE of laws are common, and in my opinion, they are generally reasonable. The guy designing a bridge I might someday drive over better know what the Hell he's doing. But the wording of THIS law is shit. For comparison, At least in my state, as I understand it, you're allowed to call yourself a "contractor". But you are not allowed to call yourself a "licensed contractor", and you are not allowed to do things that require a licensed contractor unless you are indeed a licensed contractor. Likewise, in the contractor world, you are allowed to DIY almost anything, you are just sometimes required to get it inspected (and call before you dig). The wording of this law, it sounds like under no circumstance are you allowed to DIY engineering of any sort; even for stuff that you own, that is on your property. and that makes no damned sense.
I think the theory is that by obtaining the extra credentials, you have more invested in your situation that acts as an incentive to not do things that would cause you to lose your license....I don't think this makes that much sense either. And I WISH pharmacists in the US could prescribe certain drugs. I spent 7 years as a pharmacy tech, and they absolutely have the knowledge to do so, and most pharmacists almost never get to flex those pharmacist muscles.
Not according to the letter of the law: "A person is practicing or offering to practice engineering if the person...Through the use of some other title implies that the person is an engineer" 672.001 and "no person shall practice or offer to practice engineering in this state unless the person is registered and has a valid certificate to practice engineering" 672.020. You are not allowed to imply that you are an engineer unless you're a registered engineer. In practice, sure, they'd probably be fine with it. You are not even allowed to claim to be capable of building stuff if you aren't registered. It doesn't have any clause that allows you to speak in hypotheticals. It is a poorly written law.
It's not that hard, but it's completely unreasonable. If you are licensed or legally employed as an engineer in other state, it's appropriate to call yourself an engineer. It's a dumb law. Make Registered Engineer a reserved word if you want, but not "engineer". According to the laws wording, you can say the examples you give. But if you said "I'm an engineer, but I'm not registered in Oregon" that still means you called yourself an engineer, and thus, you're practicing engineering without registering, thus you've broken the law. That's broken.
Nah, they explicitly state that calling yourself an engineer counts as practicing engineering. ORS672.007(1)-b. It shouldn't. It makes it impossible to describe yourself as an engineer when you are not registered in the state, even if it's a true statement. It's an overbroad law that infringes on the first amendment.
Thank you. Yeah, it looks like it's just 672.007(1)-b that's the problem. There should be a legal distinction between "engineer" and "registered engineer". Having it be otherwise serves no benefit. By the letter of the law, that wording means that even calling yourself "engineer who is not registered in the state of Oregon" counts as practicing engineering. The law makes it so you can't refer to yourself by occupation if you are under that circumstance.
Electronics engineering relates to timing on traffic lights. Who do you think develops the mechanism to set the timing? There's nothing wrong with declaring your background. It's not as though he said, "you should agree with everything I say in this letter because I'm an EE."
Good insight, thank you. But the law in question doesn't say you can't call yourself an engineer. It says you can't practice engineering or offer to practice engineering in the state. He has done neither. Arguing that calling yourself an engineer implies that you are a registered professional engineer in that state is ridiculous, and if it's typical for the state to interpret the law as such, then that's a practice that should change. The law as written is perfectly reasonable.
It's more than just surveying. It's designing any structure or process that has the potential to be a risk to life, health or property. Even if he said "8 seconds would be better than 7 seconds" or whatever, that still shouldn't count, since it's not a proper engineering deliverable. Now if he offered to be the engineer responsible for designing the timing on the lights, that'd be different.
There's no "should" about it. The First amendment does trump state law. The Constitution is clear on that. The problem here appears to be that one or more people misinterpreted the law in question. This is partly because it's poorly written, and fails to define what constitutes practicing engineering. Now if he said, "you should hire me as an engineer to fix your lights," that would violate the law.
But the guy clearly didn't violate that law. The law in question is in regards to "safeguard(ing) life, health and property," In other words, you aren't allowed to build a bridge or yourself select a timing for traffic lights. You _are_ allowed to observe, experiment, and provide information. You just can't be treated as an authoritative source.
Quality CS programs have every bit as much logic and reasoning as engineering programs. Frequently, they have quite a lot more. And the only math that they miss out on is advanced math that only applies to pretty specific realms. I know there's a struggle over whether or not CS should require Calculus, and I've known many people who dropped out because of that calc requirement. Personally, I think it's extremely valuable.
When I was waiting for a new project to begin, my company put me on infrastructure purchasing for a while. I did horribly at it. That said, in a lot of business, the mentality is to never go cheap on development hardware, because when it breaks, the combined salaries of all the man-hours wasted is usually higher than the money saved. And even tiny amounts of latency creates massive productivity losses with autocad.
Do you feel better now that you got that out of your system? Just because your parents corrected you when you made grammar mistakes, it doesn't mean that it was behavior that you should imitate socially. Unless you're genuinely confused by someone's words, there's no value in correcting them.
You didn't have a computer on every desk. But more and more, in the 1970s, you saw the universities buying terminals. And before we had a computer on every desk, computer scientists would work out programs on paper and implement them via punchcards. Parent is wrong about there not being a CS degree. It wasn't as common as it is now, but all the major tech schools had at least started a CS department by 1970. In the US, things like the Cold War made computing a pretty high priority, so there was lots of funding to be had.
You are completely wrong about CS degrees. The first computer science program began at the University of Cambridge in 1953. In the US, Purdue University started their CS program in 1962. Universities adopting a CS program increased pretty rapidly through the 1970s. If you were an engineering school in the 1970s, you had to have a mainframe. And if you're gonna bother to invest in a mainframe, you might as well set up a proper CS department to make the most use of it. The intel 4004 microprocessor came out in 1971. From there, it was pretty immediately obvious that programming was gonna be huge.
You hear rumbling about the US shifting to that model from time to time, and to an extent, we do that. Often the model is that the doctor acts as oversight. You get a hello from her, she signs off on the diagnosis/treatment and then moves on to the next patient. The biggest stumbling block I see that will likely always require doctor participation is in prescribing controlled substances. We require extra credentials for that because of that abuse potential.
A couple years ago, I spent an extra 6 hours waiting in an ER bed because they wanted to get the specialist to look at my injury and his shift hadn't started yet. In my admittedly complete and total armchair armchair opinion, I don't think that was necessary at all.
Sure, you'd either want it to have some clever method of utilizing risidual heat to force the moist air to rise up and out of such a vent, or you'd want to build in a dinky exhaust fan to circulate the air between the washer and the ambient air, and maybe a hygrometer or two to know when to shut off. You might even be able to pipe the moist air out through the dryer exhaust. My washer is one of the moldy models, and I've never had any problems with doing a pre-soak. So long as I leave the door open after the wash, everything is mold and odor free. You may have had an even worse washer design than mine, or there's a slight chance you had a damaged gasket. Oh well; I'm glad you're happy with the new washer!
It's pretty common for people to get protective of their stuff, whether it's a car, or a kitchen, a laundry-room or a workshop. It's also common for people to get the fussy attitude of "only I can use this thing right" out of a sense of self-importance. Or maybe she just really wants to do their laundry because she likes to feel useful. Or maybe he was slightly embellishing the nature of the "paranoid lectures" to better explain why he was wary of the machines. Now, is it "possible" she's had to deal with ditsy/forgetful family members repeatedly molding up he washer despite clearly and repeatedly explaining the situation? Sure! But you authoritatively decided that this one possibility out of many was the only reasonable cause, and then went on to insult the guy's family, saying "Obviously, too many of your family members are idiots, and can't follow simple instructions". Taking that attitude when provided with no additional background is a pretty harsh way to treat strangers on the Internet.
And besides, screwing that sort of thing up, even screwing it up repeatedly doesn't necessarily make someone an idiot. Kids are trained at an early age not to leave doors open. This can get ingrained pretty deep, such that when you see an door hanging open; particularly when it's potentially hanging out like a potential safety hazard, and you're walking by it anyway, you may be compelled to close it. And if you happen to be distracted with something else at the same time, like being in the middle of a conversation, then it's not idiotic memory of the newer, less inuitive instruction may fail to signal.
FWIW, thanks to the class-action lawsuit on the matter, if you owned one of these, you're entitled to a $50 check, and up to something like a 30% reimbursement if you did indeed end up replacing the washer.
I looked into it and based on another study they did yeah, they tested all engineers. It looks like they wanted scary numbers so employers would be alarmed into buying licenses to administer the test, and universities would be alarmed into buying licenses and materials to teach the test. Because this looks like a seriously fudged research-design.
It's because this study is Bull. The company that wrote the test also designed and conducted the study, and they intentionally did it using engineers of every category. That's a big part of why the numbers are so low. You don't need to make C++ code compile too often when you're a mechanical engineer building a steam-turbine or something. Restrict the test to senior-level computer-science students, give them 3 days to prepare based on a syllabus, and promise them larger and larger cash-prizes the higher they score so that they'll take the test seriously. Then watch the numbers change completely. The company won't do that because the scary numbers lets them sell materials to teach-the-test to universities, and sell licenses to use the test as part of the interview-process to employers, and sell guides on how to pass the test to students and job-seekers because now all the universities and employers are demanding the test. Sneaky stuff, huh?
I studied in a tier I institute. Even there, S/W Eng was taught as a subject you just have to endure.
Is this true even if you declare Computer-Science as your focus/major? In most "4-year" Universities in the US, if you want to graduate anywhere close to 4-years you gotta be taking a intro-programming course your very first semester. Many other fields, you can spend a couple semesters deciding on your major. Also, to confirm, there's different types of engineering college programs there, right? Like electrical engineering and mechanical engineering and Software-Engineering/Computer-Science are separate fields? Because the company that wrote this test and did this study seems to think that all of them should be able to make code compile, and that makes no sense to me.
And yeah, startup companies' source-code is very frequently lousy. It's usually written by young guys who might be aware of all the latest tools, but they haven't yet learned how critical it is to make code readable for when you need to add features and fix bugs down the road. And startups constantly suffer from hero-coders that are great at getting stuff to work quickly, but the code written can't be looked at without shouting "WTF?!?" every couple minutes. The only thing worse that I've repeatedly experienced is Electronics Engineers who picked up a "Learn to program C in 21 days" book in their 40s and figured "how hard could it be?" They tend to be extra nasty about tiny-nonsense variable names, acronyms they only they know the meaning of, and copy/pasting code so much that the source would be 1/100th the size if written with a little forethought and refactoring as appropriate. They also often like to directly fiddle with stuff at the memory level for no good reason, and continue to argue that stuff like OO-Programming is "just a fad".
Different but similar study by the same company it looks like they are testing engineers from all fields just so they can publish an alarmist report conveniently failing to mention that it's just SHOCKING that a mechanical engineer wouldn't know Object Oriented programming!/s These guys are selling the very test they studied. This is spam that got picked up because it looks legit and regular news (and slashdot editors) don't bother to investigate when given a chance to print outrage-pr0n. It's scaring students, universities, and employers into licensing the test or test-training resources.
Yeah, this is really just all over the place. In one place I'm seeing "Engineers" another "Engineering students" and another says "IT". Well students can mean first semester coding, "Engineer" for all we know might include EE and Mech E., and "IT" can include cable-runners and network guys who never write code.
...OK, I found a link to a different study by the same company with similar themes. It looks like parent and my suspicions were warranted. So in the case I found, Aspiring Minds did a study where they gave their own test, the computer programming portion of the AMCAT (A product that they sell), to engineers of _all_ fields. And they drew similar alarmist conclusions to what we're seeing in TFA. I'd love to have more information on the actual study, but, for some reason, I can't seem to even find so much as a citation, let alone an abstract of this study anywhere...so, sounds like an private press-release. Meanwhile, The link I did find has no authors attributed to it, it is not published in a proper journal, and there's no evidence of peer review.
TFA is about giving a somewhat different coding assessment they call "Automata". Whereas their "Computer Programming" test is language agnostic, this one is language specific. Supposedly the test takers do indeed get access to a compiler and a "simulated integrated environment" (and who's to say if that thing is any good?), but at least it sounds like you're permitted to compile and execute test-cases before submitting your answer to a problem....Sounds to me like a test where unfamiliarity with the test is seriously gonna hose you. And if the study isn't gonna affect your grades, then what motivation do you have to seriously try your best on it??
This is trash. They aren't gonna be able to filter out biases in test design, test execution, or in making conclusions. Why on earth would you bother to test non-computer engineers on programming skills? What knowledge do you seriously gain from giving a bunch of students a test on topics that their field of study usually doesn't care about and acting surprised when they fail it? From what I can see, this is a company that is attempting to sell its services to companies doing interviews. So this is a FUD paper: "You'd better purchase the license to give our test to your prospective hires or who knows what horrible employee you'll get! And hey, universities, maybe if you worked with us more, these scary numbers wouldn't happen quite so much!"
This story is only spreading because the results sound scary and because people just love the narrative that offshore software development is a bad idea. And IMHO, if you aren't good at building requirements and hashing them out remotely, then I think it is indeed either a bad idea or a pretty painful ordeal. But it's not because India is a nation of incompetent software engineers! It's because it's really tricky to define what you want in a fire-and-forget manner.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm well aware the TYPE of laws are common, and in my opinion, they are generally reasonable. The guy designing a bridge I might someday drive over better know what the Hell he's doing. But the wording of THIS law is shit. For comparison, At least in my state, as I understand it, you're allowed to call yourself a "contractor". But you are not allowed to call yourself a "licensed contractor", and you are not allowed to do things that require a licensed contractor unless you are indeed a licensed contractor. Likewise, in the contractor world, you are allowed to DIY almost anything, you are just sometimes required to get it inspected (and call before you dig). The wording of this law, it sounds like under no circumstance are you allowed to DIY engineering of any sort; even for stuff that you own, that is on your property. and that makes no damned sense.
I think the theory is that by obtaining the extra credentials, you have more invested in your situation that acts as an incentive to not do things that would cause you to lose your license....I don't think this makes that much sense either. And I WISH pharmacists in the US could prescribe certain drugs. I spent 7 years as a pharmacy tech, and they absolutely have the knowledge to do so, and most pharmacists almost never get to flex those pharmacist muscles.
Not according to the letter of the law: "A person is practicing or offering to practice engineering if the person...Through the use of some other title implies that the person is an engineer" 672.001 and "no person shall practice or offer to practice engineering in this state unless the person is registered and has a valid certificate to practice engineering" 672.020. You are not allowed to imply that you are an engineer unless you're a registered engineer. In practice, sure, they'd probably be fine with it. You are not even allowed to claim to be capable of building stuff if you aren't registered. It doesn't have any clause that allows you to speak in hypotheticals. It is a poorly written law.
Seriously. As is, XBox Live Gold is not a service, it's just extortion.
It's not that hard, but it's completely unreasonable. If you are licensed or legally employed as an engineer in other state, it's appropriate to call yourself an engineer. It's a dumb law. Make Registered Engineer a reserved word if you want, but not "engineer". According to the laws wording, you can say the examples you give. But if you said "I'm an engineer, but I'm not registered in Oregon" that still means you called yourself an engineer, and thus, you're practicing engineering without registering, thus you've broken the law. That's broken.
Nah, they explicitly state that calling yourself an engineer counts as practicing engineering. ORS672.007(1)-b. It shouldn't. It makes it impossible to describe yourself as an engineer when you are not registered in the state, even if it's a true statement. It's an overbroad law that infringes on the first amendment.
Thank you. Yeah, it looks like it's just 672.007(1)-b that's the problem. There should be a legal distinction between "engineer" and "registered engineer". Having it be otherwise serves no benefit. By the letter of the law, that wording means that even calling yourself "engineer who is not registered in the state of Oregon" counts as practicing engineering. The law makes it so you can't refer to yourself by occupation if you are under that circumstance.
Electronics engineering relates to timing on traffic lights. Who do you think develops the mechanism to set the timing? There's nothing wrong with declaring your background. It's not as though he said, "you should agree with everything I say in this letter because I'm an EE."
Good insight, thank you. But the law in question doesn't say you can't call yourself an engineer. It says you can't practice engineering or offer to practice engineering in the state. He has done neither. Arguing that calling yourself an engineer implies that you are a registered professional engineer in that state is ridiculous, and if it's typical for the state to interpret the law as such, then that's a practice that should change. The law as written is perfectly reasonable.
It's more than just surveying. It's designing any structure or process that has the potential to be a risk to life, health or property. Even if he said "8 seconds would be better than 7 seconds" or whatever, that still shouldn't count, since it's not a proper engineering deliverable. Now if he offered to be the engineer responsible for designing the timing on the lights, that'd be different.
There's no "should" about it. The First amendment does trump state law. The Constitution is clear on that. The problem here appears to be that one or more people misinterpreted the law in question. This is partly because it's poorly written, and fails to define what constitutes practicing engineering. Now if he said, "you should hire me as an engineer to fix your lights," that would violate the law.
But the guy clearly didn't violate that law. The law in question is in regards to "safeguard(ing) life, health and property," In other words, you aren't allowed to build a bridge or yourself select a timing for traffic lights. You _are_ allowed to observe, experiment, and provide information. You just can't be treated as an authoritative source.
When I was waiting for a new project to begin, my company put me on infrastructure purchasing for a while. I did horribly at it. That said, in a lot of business, the mentality is to never go cheap on development hardware, because when it breaks, the combined salaries of all the man-hours wasted is usually higher than the money saved. And even tiny amounts of latency creates massive productivity losses with autocad.
The Process is all. The Process be praised.
Do you feel better now that you got that out of your system? Just because your parents corrected you when you made grammar mistakes, it doesn't mean that it was behavior that you should imitate socially. Unless you're genuinely confused by someone's words, there's no value in correcting them.
You didn't have a computer on every desk. But more and more, in the 1970s, you saw the universities buying terminals. And before we had a computer on every desk, computer scientists would work out programs on paper and implement them via punchcards. Parent is wrong about there not being a CS degree. It wasn't as common as it is now, but all the major tech schools had at least started a CS department by 1970. In the US, things like the Cold War made computing a pretty high priority, so there was lots of funding to be had.
You are completely wrong about CS degrees. The first computer science program began at the University of Cambridge in 1953. In the US, Purdue University started their CS program in 1962. Universities adopting a CS program increased pretty rapidly through the 1970s. If you were an engineering school in the 1970s, you had to have a mainframe. And if you're gonna bother to invest in a mainframe, you might as well set up a proper CS department to make the most use of it. The intel 4004 microprocessor came out in 1971. From there, it was pretty immediately obvious that programming was gonna be huge.
A couple years ago, I spent an extra 6 hours waiting in an ER bed because they wanted to get the specialist to look at my injury and his shift hadn't started yet. In my admittedly complete and total armchair armchair opinion, I don't think that was necessary at all.
Sure, you'd either want it to have some clever method of utilizing risidual heat to force the moist air to rise up and out of such a vent, or you'd want to build in a dinky exhaust fan to circulate the air between the washer and the ambient air, and maybe a hygrometer or two to know when to shut off. You might even be able to pipe the moist air out through the dryer exhaust. My washer is one of the moldy models, and I've never had any problems with doing a pre-soak. So long as I leave the door open after the wash, everything is mold and odor free. You may have had an even worse washer design than mine, or there's a slight chance you had a damaged gasket. Oh well; I'm glad you're happy with the new washer!
And besides, screwing that sort of thing up, even screwing it up repeatedly doesn't necessarily make someone an idiot. Kids are trained at an early age not to leave doors open. This can get ingrained pretty deep, such that when you see an door hanging open; particularly when it's potentially hanging out like a potential safety hazard, and you're walking by it anyway, you may be compelled to close it. And if you happen to be distracted with something else at the same time, like being in the middle of a conversation, then it's not idiotic memory of the newer, less inuitive instruction may fail to signal. FWIW, thanks to the class-action lawsuit on the matter, if you owned one of these, you're entitled to a $50 check, and up to something like a 30% reimbursement if you did indeed end up replacing the washer.
I looked into it and based on another study they did yeah, they tested all engineers. It looks like they wanted scary numbers so employers would be alarmed into buying licenses to administer the test, and universities would be alarmed into buying licenses and materials to teach the test. Because this looks like a seriously fudged research-design.
It's because this study is Bull. The company that wrote the test also designed and conducted the study, and they intentionally did it using engineers of every category. That's a big part of why the numbers are so low. You don't need to make C++ code compile too often when you're a mechanical engineer building a steam-turbine or something. Restrict the test to senior-level computer-science students, give them 3 days to prepare based on a syllabus, and promise them larger and larger cash-prizes the higher they score so that they'll take the test seriously. Then watch the numbers change completely. The company won't do that because the scary numbers lets them sell materials to teach-the-test to universities, and sell licenses to use the test as part of the interview-process to employers, and sell guides on how to pass the test to students and job-seekers because now all the universities and employers are demanding the test. Sneaky stuff, huh?
I studied in a tier I institute. Even there, S/W Eng was taught as a subject you just have to endure.
Is this true even if you declare Computer-Science as your focus/major? In most "4-year" Universities in the US, if you want to graduate anywhere close to 4-years you gotta be taking a intro-programming course your very first semester. Many other fields, you can spend a couple semesters deciding on your major. Also, to confirm, there's different types of engineering college programs there, right? Like electrical engineering and mechanical engineering and Software-Engineering/Computer-Science are separate fields? Because the company that wrote this test and did this study seems to think that all of them should be able to make code compile, and that makes no sense to me.
And yeah, startup companies' source-code is very frequently lousy. It's usually written by young guys who might be aware of all the latest tools, but they haven't yet learned how critical it is to make code readable for when you need to add features and fix bugs down the road. And startups constantly suffer from hero-coders that are great at getting stuff to work quickly, but the code written can't be looked at without shouting "WTF?!?" every couple minutes. The only thing worse that I've repeatedly experienced is Electronics Engineers who picked up a "Learn to program C in 21 days" book in their 40s and figured "how hard could it be?" They tend to be extra nasty about tiny-nonsense variable names, acronyms they only they know the meaning of, and copy/pasting code so much that the source would be 1/100th the size if written with a little forethought and refactoring as appropriate. They also often like to directly fiddle with stuff at the memory level for no good reason, and continue to argue that stuff like OO-Programming is "just a fad".
Different but similar study by the same company it looks like they are testing engineers from all fields just so they can publish an alarmist report conveniently failing to mention that it's just SHOCKING that a mechanical engineer wouldn't know Object Oriented programming! /s These guys are selling the very test they studied. This is spam that got picked up because it looks legit and regular news (and slashdot editors) don't bother to investigate when given a chance to print outrage-pr0n. It's scaring students, universities, and employers into licensing the test or test-training resources.
TFA is about giving a somewhat different coding assessment they call "Automata". Whereas their "Computer Programming" test is language agnostic, this one is language specific. Supposedly the test takers do indeed get access to a compiler and a "simulated integrated environment" (and who's to say if that thing is any good?), but at least it sounds like you're permitted to compile and execute test-cases before submitting your answer to a problem....Sounds to me like a test where unfamiliarity with the test is seriously gonna hose you. And if the study isn't gonna affect your grades, then what motivation do you have to seriously try your best on it??
This is trash. They aren't gonna be able to filter out biases in test design, test execution, or in making conclusions. Why on earth would you bother to test non-computer engineers on programming skills? What knowledge do you seriously gain from giving a bunch of students a test on topics that their field of study usually doesn't care about and acting surprised when they fail it? From what I can see, this is a company that is attempting to sell its services to companies doing interviews. So this is a FUD paper: "You'd better purchase the license to give our test to your prospective hires or who knows what horrible employee you'll get! And hey, universities, maybe if you worked with us more, these scary numbers wouldn't happen quite so much!"
This story is only spreading because the results sound scary and because people just love the narrative that offshore software development is a bad idea. And IMHO, if you aren't good at building requirements and hashing them out remotely, then I think it is indeed either a bad idea or a pretty painful ordeal. But it's not because India is a nation of incompetent software engineers! It's because it's really tricky to define what you want in a fire-and-forget manner.
I'm saying we shouldn't do that until we have a robot that can do it for us.
And I want mine to look like Rosie from The Jetsons. She was always hanging up laundry.