It's an interesting point, since I don't know how much other engineering fields are beset with this problem. The article features a photo of a collapsed bridge, but obviously its topic is software. Do civil or aerospace engineering firms have the same problem of incompetent coworkers who manage to pass all their interviewing hurdles? It seems hard to imagine -- I don't know how I'd fake the math on static and dynamic loads without actually knowing what I was doing. Why is software so different, lacking basic shared and provable prerequisite skills?

Similar to the title MD for doctors or JD for lawyers, engineers have the PE (Professional Engineer) title. It requires a bachelors degree from an ABET accredited school, 4 years of experience, and pass two day long exams. It's pretty rigorous.

Also, based on my experience with engineering interviews, they rarely have what I would call "hurdles." It's not a gauntlet that they have pass, usually it's just a relaxed conversation about their skills and experience to make sure they fit the position and will work well with our team.

"Why is software so different, lacking basic shared and provable prerequisite skills?"

It shouldn't be; I think we generally don't have enough people that yet recognize this as a Real Problem(tm), and therefore don't know how to do good filtering/interviewing up front. I think it may be another generation or two before there's really enough pushback to start demanding the same level of scrutiny other industries may have.

Now, a bad doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc might slip through the cracks now and then, but there's pretty strong proof that at one point they did Know Something (tm) about their field, more through professional licensing than standard higher ed, for example, but it was there.

I have so little faith in the value of most higher-ed degrees as higher-ed seems primarily profit and ratings driven, vs capabilities driven. Professional orgs like bar associations actually have some economic incentives to keep people out of practicing law. Universities seem to have no incentive to fail people out, and every incentive to continue grade inflation.

> Universities seem to have no incentive to fail people out, and every incentive to continue grade inflation.

Ostensibly, the idea is that if you don't weed out the idiots, you are going to end up with people with degrees from your university who are garbage, and this hurts your brand. You see this happening with for-profit colleges, where grade inflation is particularly egregious. "Well, we've given a bunch of DeVry grads a chance, and they've all done terribly. We're not going to be considering DeVry grads anymore unless they can really, really prove that they're any good."

This should, in turn, get back to prospective students, who won't go to a college if it can't get them a job.

Unfortunately, you're now at three steps that are pretty opaque and difficult to measure, and the rewards for lowering standards are immediate and vast.

> You see this happening with for-profit colleges, where grade inflation is particularly egregious

I see it happening with people all sorts of colleges and universities. It's gotten to the point where if/when I meet a young graduate who has good communication and thinking skills, I consider them an anomaly, or suspect strongly that they already had these skills before college.

In my experience (biomedical), this concern does not exist in other engineering fields. That may be because incompetent engineers are just accepted, or because they don't exist--I don't know. Other engineering fields also generally don't engage in extensive quizzing during interviews.

There are a series of licensing exams for the (non-software) engineering fields: one typically takes the Engineer-In-Training exam at the end of undergrad, then can take the Professional Engineer exam after a few years of working under a licensed PE (exact regulations vary from state to state).

These exams are more common for civil than electrical engineers; if I remember correctly, there are regulations that require a Professional Engineer to sign off on blueprints.

I've interned in big, international company, doing finite element analysis, a method for structural analysis on computers.

As an intern, I didn't get the formal training on the software suites used, I came in with a bit of experience on another software, and a bit of theoretical knowledge from school. I managed to pick up enough in 4-6 weeks using tutorials, manuals, and the engineers around me that I think I was as productive as you could expect an entry-level engineer to be (fwiw, I had a job offer on the table before finishing that internship).

I clearly remember two guys there. One was contractor, late-20ish and I think had started not too long before I did. The other was middle-aged and I think had been working for the company for quite a couple years. Both quite incompetent. At first I thought it was me, if I couldn't explain something to them there must be something I'm getting wrong right? By the end of my term I had picked up enough, underhandedly, from other engineers, that these guys were incompetent. It was never openly admitted though. But these guys were given only the most basic, boring, tedious work requiring absolutely no actual engineering analysis.

Don't get me wrong, these were 2 guys out of 150ish people doing FEA there, and all the others were absolutely brilliant and I learned a lot. But there are incompetent people everywhere, I think. In my graduating class there was definitely a 5% ish of people which everyone else knew were not going to be doing engineering work. These people often end up as production supervisors and such, never get their PE.

Even in grad school, they are tougher to find, but there's definitely people graduating with MSc's and PhD's who couldn't engineer their way out of a bag. Generally recruited by bad profs who do all the actual thinking and just give them narrow, grunt work to do. There's safeguards in place at the University level to prevent that, especially for PhDs, but it does happen, unfortunately.

I should probably have taken that job offer, but I really wanted to see what academia/research was like.

Needlessly pedantic.

Really? As a non-software engineer, the title and bridge picture suggested this would be relevant to me, much more so than an article about programmer interviews.

Except if you're somewhere where it does matter. Take Canada for instance, you cannot call yourself an engineer without being a licensed Professional Engineer.

I strongly disagree; it seems rather perverse to label many developers and programmers as engineers, because most of what occurs in development and programming, especially because of the lack of rigor involved, could scarcely be passed off under the heading of traditional engineering, and should not be confused as such.