Honest curiosity: is it fraud (in the US) to claim that you are a member of a profession that you are not? (I am not saying that is what he intended to do here).
For example, if someone owes me money, is it illegal for me to send them a letter, in which I purport to be a lawyer?
Engineering isn't exactly the same, but I worked IT at an architecture firm and workers there were not legally allowed to call themselves "Architect" without being licensed.
There are several facts that affect whether the consequence of claiming to have a professional qualification is regulatory or criminal (being two branches of "illegal"), including (but not limited to), in no particular order:
1. Who you send it to
2. The purpose of the communication
3. The consequences of the communication
4. Whether it is inter- or intra-state
5. What profession it is
There are other questions that can factor in, but the general rule is: don't lie.
Lying of any form for personal gain is generally a species of fraud, but pretending to have a professional qualification – even without gain – can also incur consequences.
It's not limited to professional qualifications; some places still observe the crime of jactitation, which is pretending to be married.
"However, it is important to make a distinction between a "graduate engineer" and a "professional engineer" or "licensed engineer." A "graduate engineer" is anyone holding a degree in engineering from an accredited four-year university program, but is not licensed to practice or offer services to the public. Unlicensed engineers usually work as employees for a company, or as professors in engineering colleges, where they are governed under the industrial exemption clause. Some states, such as Ohio and New Jersey, prohibit the use of the term "engineer" by an unlicensed person unless it is part of the internal classification of their employer."
So you don't need a license to call yourself an engineer. What this effectively does is permits engineers to perform engineering tasks and be called engineers in their line of work, without having to complete the examinations and all of that jazz. Otherwise, the entire system makes 0 sense. Furthermore, this demonstrates that you may call yourself an engineer if you have graduated from engineering college as you are under granted the title "graduate engineer", and thus can use engineer for shorthand, just as "engineers in training" and "professional engineers" may call themselves engineers for short. I doubt they want to always have to call themselves professional engineers or engineers in training or face a silly fine.
Though I do fully support requiring licensure for some engineering related work. Basically, if you can fuck something up that can cost lives (aviation, bridges, buildings, etc...), you should have a license. Screwing up some code or mixing industrial chemicals normally doesn't fall into that category, though. If it does then yes you should be licensed.
There's no achievement in pointing out 'faulty reasoning' when the OP explicitly stated that it was a simplification. You just complicated it again to feel like you had a point.
Where did I say it was an achievement? Was the OP an achievement? The simplification was inherently incorrect, and contradictory. To say that I "feel" that I had a point is nonsense. There's no "feeling" here, it's simply a stated factual point. All you have to do is search for "mechanical engineer" or something along those lines.
A narrow pedantry rarely leads to insight. The basic point that 'engineer' is a restricted title in many jurisdictions and contexts is sound, notwithstanding your emotional aversion to it. This has been explained through the thread at length, often by people more eloquent than I.
A more interesting question, to me: would it be more or less dangerous to create a fictional person, who "is" a lawyer—or a fictional LLP, run by such a person†—and then send a letter written "as" them, representing you?
By sending such a letter, I'm not claiming to be a lawyer, right? But then, what am I doing?
† The law was at least smart enough here to require a partnership structure. Imagine if your fictional lawyer could be "employed by" a real shell corporation!
> By sending such a letter, I'm not claiming to be a lawyer, right?
Wrong. The author of the letter (you) is falsely claiming to be a lawyer. You are also falsely claiming other things, which may or may not have additional consequences.
I don't see how. I'm not falsely claiming that I'm a lawyer. I'm falsely claiming that someone else is a lawyer—a fictional person. (I write claims in the voices of fictional people all the time; I'm a novelist.) Is it because I would presumably be writing the letter with a first-person-viewpoint prose style?
If so, then would it change anything if I just wrote a letter as myself, saying that I would contact my named, fictitious lawyer and have them draw up a suit against the recipient?
Or, on a completely different (ridiculous) tangent: if a program generates an email claiming that it's a lawyer (not from a template written by a person; from genuine black-box deep-learning text generation, hooked straight up to an email client, without foreknowledge or expectation from the author that this would be the result), has the author of the program committed a crime? I would assume the author in that case more parallels the owner of an animal that did something that would have been a crime if a human did it, but is very blurry without the presumed mens rea humanity brings to the table.
You are writing a letter that purports to be written by a lawyer; you are pretending to be a lawyer that happens to have a different name than your actual name. That is both pretending to be a lawyer, and pretending other false things.
Consider if you change the communication medium from written to oral: if walk up to someone and claim a different name than is actually yours, claim to be a lawyer representing someone else (who you identify with your actual name), and then issue some demands, etc., it's pretty clear that you are claiming to be a lawyer. Changing the medium from oral communication to written doesn't change the essence at all.
I still don't see the argument, because I don't see where writing the letter translates to me claiming anything. Like, imagine that I wrote the letter as a text that would appear in a novel. And then someone else, reading my book, copy-and-pasted that text into an email and sent it to someone. I'm quite certain I'm not claiming to be a lawyer at that point (although the person who copied the text might now be, I guess.) What is the smallest change you can make to what I did by writing the novel, that would push it over the line into being a criminal act? When does a text change from fiction into a claim about reality?
I don't think the "walking up to someone" analogy applies, because there's a "me" doing that walking that the person can see, and so by asserting any claim through speech, I'd be attaching the subject of that claim to the person they're seeing—i.e. to myself. But in sending a letter written "as" someone else, there is no "me" from their perspective to attach the claim to. There's only "whoever is named [fake lawyer name]" (nobody) and "whoever sent this letter" (someone else, although I paid them to do it. Coincidentally, if I did have a lawyer, I'd be paying them to do it.)
The key concepts that generally turn actions from innocuous to culpable here are: intention, and benefit. In particular - malicious intention or ill gotten benefit turn acts into the sort we as a society frown upon and hence attempt to deter with regulatory or criminal sanction.
> I still don't see the argument, because I don't see where writing the letter translates to me claiming anything
The letter is a written statement which (whatever else.you may claim in it) is, un fact, from you, asserting various facts, including that the writer of letter is a lawyer.
The claims in the letter are made by the actual author of the letter, not the (potentially fictions) person that they are claiming to be when they wrote it.
> When does a text change from fiction into a claim about reality
When it is presented either with intent that it will be taken as a claim about reality, or when a reasonable person would see it that way. What you write in a novel is an overt work of fiction that no reasonable person, in context, will, in the general case (barring special circumstances), see as a claim of fact. If someone else copies part of it out of context and presents it differently, thats a different story, but has nothing to do with you.
When you send something that you have written to someone with the intent that they view it as what it purports to be on its face, than any knowing falsehoods in it are knowing false claims made by you, the actual person who composed and sent the communication with the intent to deceive.
Whether or not you're allowed to call yourself an engineer varies from state to state - as a very rough rule it's more likely to be regulated on the East coast than the West (Oregon excepted as we see here)
There are a number of professions in the US where yes, this is somewhat regulated. I can think of a few:
1. Medical doctors
2. Certified Public Accountants
3. Lawyers
4. Professional Engineers
5. Realtors
Many other professions and certifying agencies will claim that a certification is necessary to practice, and that you should pay them for the privilege, but these are some of the few that are legally protected.
You need a "Professional Engineer" certificate from the NSPE to sign off on certain documents. But note that these certain documents are only used in certain fields, like civil engineering. This certification is not required to be (or to claim to be) a software engineer, electronics engineer, mechanical engineer, product engineer, chemical engineer, etc. For example, I've taken many engineering courses, I have a bachelor's of science in engineering degree, and I practice engineering day-to-day without being a professional engineer. In college, perhaps 5% of my graduating class took the PE exam? And now, few of my coworkers, customers, or suppliers are professional engineers - The two individuals that I can think of transferred into the domain out of civil engineering.
The electronics engineer in the article mistakenly stumbled into the territory of civil engineers who are very, very protective of their licensure, and they overreacted IMO. I don't dispute that if he'd claimed to be an NSPE-licensed Professional Engineer, and signed off on documents which are legally required to be approved by a PE, that he'd be deserving of the punishments associated with this fraud (which are much steeper than $500). But the NSPE does not own the generic term "engineer".
To be specific, a "Realtor" is not a profession; it is a trademarked term. To be a "Realtor" one must be a member of the National Association of Realtors, which is a trade association.
It is possible to be a "real estate agent" (the profession) without being a Realtor. There are licensing requirements, which vary by state, to be a real estate agent.
It varies by state; in California the unauthorized practice of law is a crime.
Perhaps predictably, the people complaining about this feel that it's a form of rent-seeking by incumbents, but none of them have bothered to consider the flip side of the equation which is that bad actors who falsely hold themselves out as licensed professionals can hurt would-be clients in two ways: by directly exploiting them for the cost of services which they are not licensed to provide, and by jeopardizing their longer-term interests in a way that might severely impact them in the future.
Obviously this gentleman is not running around trying to scam Oregonians into paying for cut-price engineering work. But publicly asserting that you are licensed to practice a profession without actually being so, especially when licensure is generally easy to obtain, creates the potential for public misunderstanding. The point of the fine is not to impose a serious financial penalty (hence the token amount of %500) but to draw the public's attention to the fact that anyone holding themselves out as an engineer needs to be licensed within the jurisdiction in which they are practicing - and practicing on your own behalf is still practicing and indeed widely considered by professionals as a kind of marketing.
Considering that the annual fee to practice as an engineer in Oregon is only $75, and that engineering is well established as a profession, I don't think his complaints have a whole lot of merit. Last time I looked engineers are required to take ethics classes as part of their education, and in many jurisdictions keeping ones certification up requires a certain number of hours spent in continuing education each year, same as in the medical and legal professions. If you're not actively practicing your profession then you have, legally speaking, retired and should not present yourself as being currently licensed.
An odd statement to make, considering that his defense was that he doesn't need to be licensed engineer to call himself an engineer.
Where is he licensed? Why is he not licensed in Oregon, despite having been timely notified, without penalty, of the requirement to do so if he wished to claim that title? Why did he agree to abide by this requirement then break his agreement within months?
I would argue that payment is not necessarily a requirement. If someone opens a free clinic, should they be allowed to practice medicine without a licence, because it is not really 'practice'?
No. Lawyers often develop their professional profile by writing introductory or analytical articles on legal topics to establish their professional competence to the interested public.
If you say you are a member of a profession and are not obviously fake, most people will take that assertion at face value, and take any of your comments on that subject as truth. Not enforcing licensing requirements is basically an invitation to scammers.
Yep. I went to an engineering school and multiple professors told us to get our PE licenses before we called ourselves "Engineers". No court will take you seriously if you aren't licensed. Upside, if you do have a PE license you can get side-gigs as an expert witnesses.
I went through an ABET accredited electrical engineering program, and they said that those of us who didn't want to work in government shouldn't bother with it.
> As far as the government's concerned I'm a programmer.
I don't think so. It's been a bit since I read up on Visa stuff (and I imagine it doesn't matter to you as an American citizen) but there are distinctions between programmer / software developer / etc.
The NCEES absolutely offers a PE exam in the US for software engineers, for about 5 years now [1]. Most states offer PE licenses now in software engineering.
I don't know, but I remember that a slide from the NCEES from 2013 states that 30 states were already offering it, and 10 more scheduled to go online in 2014. So perhaps all 50 are offering it now? You'd have to call/check out the CA Board of Engineering to know for sure, unless someone here can confirm.
Thanks! I went through ~8 years ago when there weren't any SE focused licenses. Hadn't heard that anything had changed. Will take a run at this if it isn't too expensive.
Not true, there is now a software engineering professional engineering exam.
However, you can pass any of the PE exams and call yourself an engineer. I took the computer engineering exam, as the software exam didn't yet exist.
Nothing got trumped. He would have been fine if he had made the exact same argument with asserting that he was an engineer, a claim that has specific legal implications that are easily verified.
If you wrote an article on cardiology, and you said 'I am a doctor' but you hadn't kept your medical license current, then it would be a false claim, regardless of the fact that your article on cardiology was 100% true. Asserting a privileged status that you do not hold misleads people who rely on the licensure system as a proxy for performing due diligence.
Professionalism is about more than whether people are willing to pay you or not. It involves commitment to uphold particular standards even if it is not in your personal interest to do so.
There appears to be desire to adhere to whatever legal framework to give power and authority to status based on education and history. However, certain things are absolute and trumps any legal framework. Math and science don't change or abide by human laws. Discrediting work based on credentials may work in other fields, but you can't discredit math and science *by anything other than themselves.
Nobody is trying to discredit the math and science. I have no objection to his proposal and neither does anyone else. The issues is that he tried to use the social construct of credentials to get attention for his proposal in a manner that bordered on fraud (since he was first given a friendly warning about the inappropriateness of titling himself as an engineer).
This is not an attack on math and science no matter how much you want to see it that way. If he had been frank about his amateur status from the outset hew would have had no problem. getting it wrong without bad intentions is nothing serious either, but after he was warned and agreed to abide by the state code, he had no excuse to repeat the behavior.
You can come up with the most interesting scientific result in history, but that does not give you an automatic right to have your discovery implemented by others, does it?
Oregon is where I grew up. I returned there recently and was shocked at what I saw: a society destroyed by socialism.
There is too little capitalism in Oregon. In fact, so little that freedom is essentially dead in Oregon. I think running all of the socialists out of the big cities and getting some fire-breathing capitalists with their immigrant sidekicks in would really crack the heads of these totalitarian nut cases. I think of Oregon when the phrase "Lois Lowry's book 'The Giver' was controversial when it came out". A society so addicted to success that it develops a kind of inability to sense its own lack of freedom...sclerotic, really. Hence the fire breathing dragons to melt things down.
The great thing about capitalists is that if they don't like the laws, the laws will get changed! Almost like magic...almost.
Is it a violation of a law to write "engineer" on a resume? It's part of my title at both of my jobs - did my employer violate a law by giving a title to someone without a license?
I studied "Software Engineering" and have a bachelors degree from Australia. I am a member of the Australian Institute of Engineers (accredited degree).
If I say something like "I am a Software Engineer" when I work in Canada, any other Engineers will get all prickly and go on about how that's not a recognized kind of Engineer, and it's illegal to say-so, blah blah.
Even if I put B. Eng. (Software) after my name they get uppity.
To get my degree accredited in Canada, I must work some huge number of hours as a Software Engineer working with Software Engineers. But of course, there is no such thing in Canada, and so... yeah.
Software Engineering is definitely a recognized engineering in Canada. And it's only a year of working with a P.Eng. But you're right, it's a chicken/egg problem, which is super unfortunate. I think somewhere down the line accreditation will be more important, but PEO has backed themselves in to a corner.
Furthurmore, there are 1316 Computer Engineers. These are not huge numbers, but it is wrong to say that there is no such thing as software engineering in Canada.
No, a computer engineering program typically offers a blended course of software and hardware. It is typically half way between computer science and electrical engineering. That being said, it all depends on the university. At some universities, you can pretty much take all comp sci classes as a computer engineering major. The major difference is that it is a "real engineering" degree in that it requires the engineering core curriculum.
I cannot to speak to all schools, but at Georgia Tech Computer Engineering was (circa 2005) EE with 3 CS courses, and instead of taking courses like power engineering the focus was on courses related to computer hardware design or applications.
Looking at it now, it seems they've dropped that 3 CS course requirement (at the time it was the same first 3 courses as CS majors) and replaced it with 1 required CS course: Computing for Engineers. Everything else, required, is ECE (electrical and computer engineering) with options to satisfy some major electives via CS courses (up to 7 by the hours, but no specific sequence, required to be 3xxx or above meaning a student would need to take at least 2 or 3, depending on present CS curriculum, to even qualify for them with prerequisites).
I picked this one as it seems like the quintessential CMPE program from what I've seen, and it's one of the top engineering schools in the US so it ends up influencing or setting the standard by which other US schools do things. And specifically, it's not halfway. It's often (from a perusal of other schools I'm familiar with) heavily biased towards the hardware side (by requirements, electives of course permit the student some leeway for individual breadth).
EDIT: I did misread the current GT requirements, seems they moved 2 of the programming courses into the ECE department and out of CS.
It was definitely a blend at Queen's University in Ontario. Computer engineers could choose between hardware and software specializations. All engineers shared a common first year. Then all electrical and computer engineers shared a common second year. Third and forth years focused more on the specialties, though there was still significant overlap.
Also worth noting, professional registrations may not line up exactly with degrees. You don't necessarily need a degree in computer engineering to be a computer engineer. The board would likely find a degree in electrical engineering and a few years of relevant work experience to be sufficient. (Though, this may vary by jurisdiction.)
598 P.Eng. in a province with a population of 14 million. The odds of working with one without deliberately trying to work with one being close to none.
There's also several specialties relating to software that are similarly lacking "real engineer" status, such as QA engineering, site reliability engineering and security testing engineering.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. The same thing is true of Canadian citizens graduating from Canadian universities. If you want to work as a Professional Engineer in Canada you have to go through your provinces Engineer in Training program before you can become a PEng. I have Bachelors of Electrical Engineering from an accredited engineering program and would have to do the same thing as the OP if I wanted to become a PEng. For example, in BC (PDF): https://www.apeg.bc.ca/getmedia/f71c99f7-44d3-42c6-a313-70de...
> To get my degree accredited in Canada, I must work some huge number of hours as a Software Engineer working with Software Engineers. But of course, there is no such thing in Canada, and so... yeah.
We exist. I'm a Canadian P.Eng. (Software). I got my experience working on software for controlling unmanned vehicles, and I know a few dozen other Software P.Engs.
Requiring some amount of local experience makes sense, as a major part of engineering is ensuring your project abides by all local laws that govern what you're doing.
Getting the required work experience under the supervision of another engineer is a lot rarer than in other disciplines, but on the bright side, that P.Eng. title is required a lot less often than in other disciplines.
With that being said, it certainly is difficult for foreign engineers to get their degrees recognized. If any improvement is to be made on that front, the government almost certainly will need to prod the engineering associations into doing a better job of evaluating foreign credentials.
I've considered getting my P.Eng. once I complete my degree; do you feel that it's a worthwhile credential to have? Every P.Eng. that I've met has been involved in mechanical or electrical engineering, so I'd like to get the perspective of someone in software.
I've never used it, as I quit my job and went into grad school about the time I got it.
There are possible career benefits, though they're not huge. The company I left was just starting to require a software engineer on every team to sign off on each release. And, my father convinced me to do the paperwork for the P.Eng. with a story of a raise he missed out on due to not bothering with the P.Eng. despite holding an engineering degree.
In the US it's only of use in industries where life safety is important (you have to sign off on potentially harmful technology) or to serve as an expert witness in court.
Getting one generally requires at least one existing PE who can vouch for the quality of your work which creates a chicken and egg problem if there are no PEs where you work.
Thanks; this was my suspicion, too. The other PEs I've spoken to were bewildered that I'd consider it, given that they needed it basically to get managerial/senior engineering positions on public sector projects.
As a Canadian, the career benefit is zilch, because most of Canada's software career opportunities pale in comparison to the USA (pay is half or less, house prices are pretty close in price in employment centers!) . And in the USA, nobody cares about that when you write software.
At the end of the day, all open world idealism aside, the guild of engineers votes with their feet for guild protectionism. And of course its all to protect the users.
Not sure.
At least you are in good company- after the cold war ended, lots of famous russian mathematicians and doctors searched for work in the west- and there degrees where not accepted. I mean russian mathematicians, that combination is nearly a brand.
Fear of looking lousy next to the imported guy.
Yeah, over here in BC everyone gets all uppity too. The local engineering authority recently told a company that they couldn't advertise that it was hiring "software engineers" because it said they couldn't use the word "engineer" in the job title.
I'm not Canadian, but a long time ago, before graduate school, I was on an engineering track. Most of my friends joined my path (physics) but several went on to advanced degrees in engineering, accreditation/licensing, etc. When I describe to them what "engineering" is like in this industry they snicker and guffaw. The two fields are quite far apart. Mainly this is because software "engineering" is still quite immature. "Real" engineering has been something humans have worked on for literally millennia, so in this sense it's hardly a fair comparison.
One thing that is especially hilarious is the interview process: the equivalent of the software world's interview process would be to grill an engineer by requiring him to, say, solve a projectile motion with air-resistance problem (fairly common in first-year calculus-based mechanics classes and as review in sophomore/junior year classical mechanics) on the whiteboard and using that as a way to gauge his ability to design whole systems. These interview processes aren't good at looking for engineers, they're good at looking for code monkeys with a high opinion of themselves.
When I describe to them what "engineering" is like in this industry they snicker and guffaw. The two fields are quite far apart. Mainly this is because software "engineering" is still quite immature. "Real" engineering has been something humans have worked on for literally millennia, so in this sense it's hardly a fair comparison.
That's my underlying feeling as well. Software Engineering seems like a futuristic discipline, like being a Nanobot Technologist. We're just not there yet - why bother pretending?
Depends on where you are. At least colloquially in many places, they're the same thing. In places that have engineering certification boards and enforce the use of the word "engineer", an "engineer" would usually be able to analyze the correctness of, and sign off on something safety-critical, taking on some level of legal liability for doing that. Kind of like the civil engineer signing off on a bridge, or an architect signing off on a building design.
The line's blurry, except for places where the law gives a sharper distinction.
I do software engineering and work alongside many brilliant people with Canadian engineering degrees. I happen to have geography and science degrees, so while I do a lot of the same work, I'm not an engineer. I've settled on being a "developer" or a "roboticist".
ok, I got the title of "Computer Science Engineer" from an university in Central America, is there any other requirement I should fulfill before introducing myself as an "Engineer" in California or Washington?
Privacy may be part of the problem -- yes it would suck to publicize everyone's whole history of administrative fines, but making this information public by default would limit corrupt application of the rules.
What's wrong with this? The Board asked him to stop calling himself an engineer, without any fines, and he agreed. He broke the agreement, repeatedly, at which point they launched an investigation and then slapped him with a very small fine. I see absolutely zero evidence of corruption here. It seems a lot of readers are only looking at matters from Jarlstrom's side, and completely ignoring the fact of his bad faith.
In my opinion this is a first amendment case. The supreme court created something called 'strict scrutiny' to analyze cases where other laws encroach on the first amendment. Under strict scrutiny, the government needs to prove a compelling state interest to restrict free speech.
Does the state of oregon have a compelling interest in preventing this person from informing a state agency, via private correspondence, of a safety-related calibration issue in their traffic light system?
If you think so, interested to hear your argument.
Everyone's talking about the title issue, but it's amazing that the Oregon board doesn't believe he should be able to publish or present his ideas. You can go on and on about what it means to be a certain title, but the man should be able to put forth his work and ideas.
But they don't. He's perfectly at liberty to do so, but not to assert professional standing which he lacks in order to make it seem more convincing.
Did you read the Board's complaint? At first the asked the Board to investigate the city even though the Board had no jurisdiction to do so. they advised him of this and also cautioned him not to advertise himself as an engineer, in accordance with Oregon's code. He agreed, but then went on to write to various government and media entities promoting his idea and promoting himself as an engineer, before asserting again to the Board that he was an engineer - the very same Board to whom he had given his assurance that he would not hold himself out as such.
He could have put the exact same information and proposals out in public, saying 'I'm not an engineer, but I believe I have come up with a great solution to this traffic problem' and he would have been fine. It's simply not true for you to assert that they're trying to censor his ideas.
Look, you're not wrong. But you have to remember that none of that matters, because I can put the following notice out, and any government prohibition of such is a big payday for me:
"I, JB Reefer, am God, command you to stop driving. I am the king of all engineers, president of space, etc etc etc"
and it doesn't matter. You really do get to say whatever the fuck you want in this country, as long as it doesn't cause direct harm to someone else. There's no "this doesn't apply to job title" caveat.
That's because prohibiting hate speech would be nothing but suppression of speech. If you use hate speech to incite a riot, that is a crime. Simply saying it is not.
Similarly, simply saying "i am an engineer" is obviously not a crime. Students do it all the time, despite not being licensed. Using it to lend credence to your ideas around traffic lights, however, may be a different story. I think thats the crux of the dispute.
That and the Shouting Fire thing are both directly harmful. Calling yourself an engineer, not a PE, without a a PE is not directly harmful, and the Constitution overrides state laws that claim otherwise. My money is on him in this one.
"Shouting fire" is a reference to Schenck v. US which has been overturned. It applied the "clear and present danger" standard. The current standard is "incitement to imminent lawless action" as articulated in Brandenburg v. Ohio.
Not sure if this is sarcasm or not, but the Constitution is but one piece of law in the US. There's a litany of state legislation (and I presume federal, as well) that regulate the use of job titles (e.g., doctor, engineer, lawyer, dentist, etc.). Most of them still on the books, and most of them attempting to nip the "direct harm to someone else" in the bud. That is what this article sort of willfully ignores: sure, this guy didn't exactly go out of of his way to harm people, but others have and do for their financial (or otherwise) benefit. [1]
I doubt that these laws are going away any time soon. Perhaps modified as more and more influential people see "programming" as "engineering", but doubtful that they'll go away for things like civil/mechanical/electrical infrastructure.
Well, you can't yell fire in a movie theater unless there's a fire[0]. You can't assert that you are a doctor(lawyer) while giving medical(law) advice. There are good reasons for these laws.
> He's perfectly at liberty to [share the information]
No, he's not according to the violations cited in Final Order, page 6, section heading #14; in particular:
By reviewing, critiquing, and altering an engineered ITE formula, and submitting the critique and calculations [...] to members of the public for consideration and modification of Beaverton, Oregon's and worldwide traffic signals, which signals are public equipment, processes and works, Jarlstrom applied special knowledge of the mathematical, physical and engineering sciences to such creative work as investigation, evaluation, and design in connection with public equipment, processes, and works. Jarlstrom thereby engaged in the practice of engineering under ORS 672.005(1)(b).
...and summarizing:
By engaging the practice of engineering [...] without registration, Jarlstrom violated [laws]. [...] By again providing the public with his traffic engineering calculations for the modification of Beaverton's traffic signal timing, Jarlstrom again engaged in the practice of engineering and, specifically, the practice of traffic engineering. He thereby violated [laws] on a third occasion. By providing his publicly released traffic engineering calculations to the sheriff of the 20 county where he advised changes in traffic signals, Jarlstrom again purported to be authorized to engage in, and did engage in, the practice of engineering. He, therefore, violated [laws] on third and fourth occasions.
Yes but he wouldn't be engaging in the practice of engineering if he were to disclaim the title of engineer. Of course, if Jarlstrom were to disavow being a licensed engineer, he might not have garnered as much as interest for his proposals as he did by implying he possessed the relevant credential.
Using the title "engineer" in conjunction with "submitting the critique and calculations [...] to members of the public for consideration and modification [...] of traffic signals", I believe, is the critical part here.
If he had merely submitted the "critique and calculations" for "consideration" as a concerned citizen, he would have not gotten a fine. Simply put, he called himself an engineer and suggested that public infrastructure be changed. In Oregon, when you're not licensed by the state, you can't use the title "Engineer", and you definitely don't want to use it while trying to suggest modifications to public infrastructure.
I'm not equating the two in terms of "I believe both situations are completely just"... but doing what he did is akin to a thief walking himself into the police station. The purpose of the Board of Engineers in most states is not to decide what is "good engineering practice" and what is "bad engineering practice", it's to regulate licensure and set the bar for who is qualified to be an "Engineer" in the eyes of the state. He mis-navigated the American system, for better or worse, and paid a fine that is meant to dissuade people from doing things like this:
> Using the title "engineer" in conjunction with "submitting the critique and calculations [...] to members of the public for consideration and modification [...] of traffic signals", I believe, is the critical part here.
I hear you, and agree that when he says "I'm an engineer", we have a certain set of laws that apply to that speech.
I'm saying there is another aspect which is the the crux of the reply-to-top-level comment to which I objected: that Final Report is saying "doing [math and stuff] on [public things] is engineering, and you did [math and stuff], so you're doing engineering without a license". I don't think my "the Final Report is saying..." is unfair: check the Final Report sections 8,9, and 10.
I bet there are a lot of confounding issues in this particular case, but, very narrowly, what I'm saying is that using publicly-available data and speaking (without saying "I'm an engineer") of applications of "special knowledge of the mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences" cannot be illegal or fine-able, yet this is pretty literally what sentence three of section 13 (Final Order, Page 6) says is happening.
That's because you're lifting it out of the relevant context. He has already messed things up for them by previously claiming to be an engineer to government agencies and local and national media.
He can't unring that bell because he already accepted a warning (absent any fine or penalty) and agreed to abide by the Code on not calling himself an engineer and then repeatedly broke that agreement, so he doesn't get to keep selling his proposed traffic solution because of his demonstrated bad faith.
It's like someone who called themselves a doctor and turned out to have no medical qualifications being enjoined from wearing a white coat and a stethoscope and hanging around hospitals offering unsolicited medical advice.
According the final order, he is not. Page 2 of [0].
"Jarlstrom is not now, and never has been, registered to practice engineering in Oregon, or any other state in the United States. Jarlstrom has claimed to be a Swedish engineer. However, engineering is not a regulated profession in Sweden. No licensure, registration or certification is offered or required to practice engineering in Sweden"
The law is not without context, nor is the law not without exceptions.
Indeed there is a whole set of exceptions related to "Exception to application of ORS 672.002 to 672.325"[0].
You may be interested in ORS 672.060(6)(a and b):
(6) The performance of engineering work by a person, or by full-time employees of the person, provided:
(a) The work is in connection with or incidental to the operations of the person; and
(b) The engineering work is not offered directly to the public.
Which basically covers the run of the mills, "I'm doing math and engineering in my backyard, or my friend's front yard, or for my neighbor".
Indeed, this is one of the affirmative defenses that he tried using, but was rejected.
Basically, you can't just stop at a definition in law, you have to read the full law to know what the law says.
Understood - I read those exceptions and his attempt to use them. Obviously neither exception applies; but it's the fact that the definition of engineering in ORS 672.005(b)[0] is so broad is worrying. Saying that I can do some math and create a nice graph for my neighbor, but not post it on imgur without a fine, is a step too far for my taste.
Please do yourself a favor and read this for a while instead. Taking bits of statute in isolation and extrapolating from them is a Bad Idea, and if ou ever get sued it will impair your ability to understand your own case. I've seen what that looks like close-up and it's not pretty.
No. See my other reply above. You're ignoring important context that defines personal behavior separately from defining what the professional duties of an engineer include.
As a simple example, if you have a faint and I ask you if you're all right, what you're feeling etc., that doesn't mean I'm practicing medicine without a license despite the diagnostic nature of my questions.
I'm saying the Board's justification clearly says, irrespective of whether he said he was an engineer, just engaging in the practice of [creative work using mathematics and engineering knowledge] is subject to registration.
I mean, if he hadn't said he was an engineer to Licensed Engineers many times, I agree nobody would have bothered. But now that they've bothered, their justifications matter.
You are incorrect. See my other post with a link to the clear exceptions baked directly into the law.
If what you said were true, then he literally would not have had an affirmative defense to plead at all, which is plainly wrong as the final order specifically notes his pleading of 2 affirmative defenses.
You can find these analysis of those affirmative defenses by reviewing the sections of the final order starting at 19
Paragraph 14[0] clearly states violations as a consequence of ORS 672.007(1)(c)[1] using the definition in ORS 672.005(1)(b)[2]:
"by [critiquing an engineering formula] and submitting the critique [...] to members of the public" [...he...] thereby engaged in the practice of engineering [...] specifically, traffic engineering [...and thus] violated ORS 672.020(1), 672.045(1) and OAR 820-010-0730(3)(c)".
I agree his affirmative defenses are inadequate, but I'm not taking issue with the analysis of his defense. I simply am pointing out the justification used in Paragraph 14 is concerning. ORS672.005(1)(b) is way too broad.
But your argument only makes sense if we forget about the fact that he knowingly made a false claim to be 'an engineer' after the inappropriateness of that had been explained to him.
You could be right if that false claim hadn't happened. But it did, and everything subsequent has to be evaluated within that context. Think of the difference between global and local variables, and the sort of bugs you get if you ignore scope rules (I'm guessing you're a coder, ignore if that's not the case).
ORS 672.005(1)(b) simply describes 'stuff an engineer does', in terrifyingly broad strokes.
If "professional services or creative work" could be read as "services or creative work, either of which are done for money," perhaps it would be okay?
It's a mistake to pick out individual phrases and treat them as if they were mathematical equalities. Look at the preamble to that section:
'As used in ORS 672.002 (Definitions for ORS 672.002 to 672.325) to 672.325 (Civil penalties), unless the context requires otherwise:'
It's terrifying because you are reading bits of it out of context and extrapolating incorrectly to the broadest scope imaginable. I perform some of the activities on this list on almost a daily basis just in the normal course of making things and being an artist (the old-fashioned variety slapping paint on canvas). I have exactly zero fear of ever being prosecuted for unlicensed engineering activities.
How you should be reading it: ORS 672.005 described things that an engineer does as part of their work. Then you go on to look at ORS 672.007 which talks about how
(1) A *person* is practicing or offering to practice engineering if the person:
(a) By verbal claim, sign, advertisement, letterhead, card or in any other way implies that the person is or purports to be a registered professional engineer;
(b) Through the use of some other title implies that the person is an engineer or a registered professional engineer; or
(c) Purports to be able to perform, or who does perform, any service or work that is defined by ORS 672.005 (Additional definitions) as the practice of engineering.
You are not going to get fined just for calculating the hypotenuse of a triangle in public. In programming terms, you're worrying about the value of a variable without considering its scope.
Forgot to mention that all emphases are added by me.
> You are not going to get fined just for calculating the hypotenuse of a triangle in public
If the argument is "he said he was an 'engineer' and he isn't licensed", that's fine. And the Board's Final Report contains a lot of language establishing that, and for that he can be fined.
But the Board's Report goes out of its way to say that ORS 672.005(c) and ORS 672.002 define "practicing engineering" as quite close to just "calculating the hypotenuse of a triangle in public", and that just practicing engineering in this manner without registration is not allowed. Check Section 14 of the Final Report. It makes no reference to "purporting to be an engineer": it's "by [critiquing an engineering formula] and submitting the critique [...] to members of the public" [...he...] thereby engaged in the practice of engineering [...] specifically, traffic engineering [...and thus] violated ORS 672.020(1), 672.045(1) and OAR 820-010-0730(3)(c)".
Why do you keep ignoring the fact that he had already repeatedly and knowingly made false claims of being an engineer despite having agreed not to do so? Doing engineer-y things is not the problem, it's doing them in the context of falsely presenting oneself as an engineer that's the problem.
If you go around claiming to be a doctor, but don't do anything related to being a doctor and in no way operate as a doctor, then presumably this isn't a crime to be fined.
If you tell people you are not a doctor, and you do doctor things, then there's no misunderstanding, and nothing to fine
But if you tell people you are a doctor (or let people think you are), when you are not, and you do doctory things, then there's trouble.
It seems reasonable to me that it requires both the misunderstanding and the potential to create public harm for it to be a crime/fine-able.
In your metaphor "doctor" is a protected term in many jurisdictions, so merely claiming to be a medical doctor is a crime. And practising medicine without a licence is similarly illegal, even if you make it clear that you're not a doctor.
Is is an intellectual mistake, but, as demonstrated by this case and others, it is a mistake which clearly happens in the real world, and one whose consequences are inflicted upon people who have little ability to defend themselves
But after he first contacted them, they gave him a warning not to do that, and an explanation of why, and he agreed to abide by this. There was no fine and no punishment was inflicted on anyone.
But instead of pitching his idea as a simple concerned resident he went back to claiming to be an engineer a couple of months later. That's not a mistake because the issue had already been clearly explained to him. He's not a victim.
Offtopic, but I just wanted to point out that your comment looks like this: http://imgur.com/FGi9jsv
It's quite difficult to read, and even harder for mobile users. It might be better to use > or asterisks for quoting.
For anyone else who was trying to read the quoted parts, here they are:
He's perfectly at liberty to [share the information]
No, he's not according to the violations cited in Final Order, page 6, section heading #14; in particular:
> By reviewing, critiquing, and altering an engineered ITE formula,
and submitting the critique and calculations [...] to members of
the public for consideration and modification of Beaverton,
Oregon's and worldwide traffic signals, which signals are public
equipment, processes and works, Jarlstrom applied special knowledge
of the mathematical, physical and engineering sciences to such
creative work as investigation, evaluation, and design in
connection with public equipment, processes, and works. Jarlstrom
thereby engaged in the practice of engineering under ORS
672.005(1)(b).
...and summarizing:
> By engaging the practice of engineering [...] without registration,
Jarlstrom violated [laws]. [...] By again providing the public with
his traffic engineering calculations for the modification of
Beaverton's traffic signal timing, Jarlstrom again engaged in the
practice of engineering and, specifically, the practice of traffic
engineering. He thereby violated [laws] on a third occasion. By
providing his publicly released traffic engineering calculations to
the sheriff of the 20 county where he advised changes in traffic
signals, Jarlstrom again purported to be authorized to engage in, and
did engage in, the practice of engineering. He, therefore, violated
[laws] on third and fourth occasions.
I think I figured out what happened. It looks like the source you were copying from was indented with five or six spaces. HN interprets two leading spaces as "code formatting," which turns off line wrapping.
Except the board has no standing to tell him what he can call himself. Just because they don't want him to use the title doesn't mean they can bend their own laws
True. Just because Oregon board has a narrow view of what the word 'engineer' means I do not think this gentleman should be harassed this way. I find this immoral.
Another instance I can recount is here where a woman was banned from touching horses.
He was previously warned, he accepted the warning and promised not to do it again... and then he of course did it again. What's your moral concern exactly?
My moral concern is some "board" gets to become the sole arbitrator of who is an "engineer". Ideally the board's warning must have been thrown into dustbin.
Why exactly? Are engineers somehow special? What about RN's, and architects, and home inspectors? All licensed positions. I could list a thousand different role which require licensing because a mistake in their field has serious repercussions, especially regarding safety.
I don't think most software devs should require licensing, but they're not doing what I and many others would consider 'real' engineering. At least, their mistakes don't often have serious impact on people. We're not talking about that here though, we're talking about civil engineering.
A friend grew an engineering company in Oregon from 200 employees to > 1000 employees. He took the company public and is an industry standard. His reward: getting charged with not following the letter of the law. He spent most of his life savings fighting back.
Perhaps. Here in Texas, practicing engineering without a license will result in a fine and a cease and desist, with criminal charges on subsequent occurrences.
It might seem capricious, but what typically happens is that companies operate under the radar until they get caught. Unfortunately, being ignorant of the law is not a good excuse. I'm not even sure how you can have an engineering firm that large and be ignorant of the need for licensure. It sounds like they blew it off, and it finally came back to bite them.
What's capricious? They gave him a polite warning with an explanation and no penalty which he agreed to abide by, and then promptly broke. He only made it onto their radar because he contacted them in the first place to try and lean on a city that had issued a traffic ticket he was upset about.
I guess I could see he might have an axe to grind wrt to his partner's ticket, but if he has a point, they should at least (being representatives of us poor ol citizens) respond to the point and not just slap a fine on him.
Good luck extracting that money from him, if I were him, I'd safely ignore the notice. They're going to have to prove what he does for work falls under the legal definition of engineering in that state.
Also, if his job title includes "engineer" the board is going to have a very difficult time justifying the case.
And.... this is a civil matter. His best option is to get a good lawyer and just ignore them.
You really ought to read the Board's side of this in the linked documents before jumping to multiple incorrect conclusions based on his version of events.
You realize this all started when Jarlstrom contacted the board to request that they launch an investigation of the city where his wife had received a traffic ticket?
'The board shouldn't exist' is a novel proposition. I guess you can't understand what interest the state might have in the ability to commission accurate land surveys and reliable public works. Almost makes you wonder how these things come into being in the first place, doesn't it?
You seem to be asserting the government is the only institution wholely capable of, is effective at, or even interested in verifying a person's credentials.
You seem to projecting some of your political stereotypes onto me. The Board in question is in fact semi-autonomous and self-funding and has been for nearly 20 years.
Insofar as government is a provider of public goods in the form of infrastructure I would certainly say that it has a legitimate interest in maintaining standards so as to avoid wasting public money.
The state fears challenges to all previously issued traffic violations similar to that challenged by this guy. That'd turn into a legal and financial nightmare. Hence the subversion
I am frankly both surprised and unsurprised at the same time with the comments from those supportive of government regulation of software engineering. If your a hack who didn't learn to program until you went to school, I suppose I understand, you want to limit those entering your field to those who paid the same to play. However, how about all of those who are likely far smarter than you and learned to program as children and got into the industry right off the bat - does your jealousy dictate that they should have to pay some sort of admission cost?
It's pretty cute how the same yuppies who are supportive of strict regulation are lining up to praise childhood programming courses. By the time our children are grown, programming will be illegal without a license - ushered in by the mayhem created by hipsters programming insecure IoT devices. These are the same people who praise curiosity out of one side of their mouth, but insist no one should practice cryptography because it's far too hard for mortals to understand.
I would be delighted if academic America would get off it's high horse. You're starting to look an awful lot like Hollywood circa 1998.
A few moments of reviewing your comment history in this thread indicates that you are not far from inferring a general complacency with the state of affairs - and it's okay, you aren't alone in this thread.
However, that is the problem - people shouldn't be pushed around by bureaucratic functionaries because he hasn't paid the cover charge to use the title that is appropriate for his trade. He was sending an intelligible email with genuine, well researched claims - he was disrespected, fined and suppressed.
I wonder how many emails Oregon is receiving now from engineers?
I suggest you spend more than a few moments on it as my arguments seem to have sailed completely over your head.
Did you read any of the primary source documents in the article? If not then this is going to be a waste of time. If so, please reconcile your arguments with the fact that Jarlstrom initiated contact with the board in an attempt to push a city authority around, and then broke the agreement he made to abide by Oregon's code when it was explained to him absent any kind of bureaucratic sanction.
Shouldn't need a license to prove you're an engineer unless say perhaps you're running an engineering business, where people's lives can depend on your work - e.g building a bridge.
If you have formal education in engineering, then I would think you can call yourself an engineer?
The issue that the Board has is that he claimed to be an engineer in a public forum. The Boards interpretation of "engineer" in this context was to mean Traffic Engineer.
The Board warned Järlström that he was in violation of the Law and asked him to stop claiming to be an engineer, to which he agreed. It was later, when he continued to claim to be an engineer that legal action was taken.
It is also of note, and stated in the Board's documentation of the case, that Sweden has no legal standards for engineers of any kind.
Finally, full disclosure, I am a registered and licensed traffic engineer.
Completely agreed. He pretty much barked up the one tree that actively cares about use of the title "engineer", and used it in violation of the law (as it is now).
Had he sent the letter/formula/math/suggestions to the local state university civil engineering department, the local/state Dept. of Transportation, or the local/state representative, the response would have fallen on less deaf ears, and his use of the title would have likely gone less noticed.
They didn't fine him at first. They warned him not to do it, and explained why. He acknowledged this and agreed in September 2015 not to present himself as an engineer again. Then he changed his mind and resumed doing so.
Barry Schwartz specializes in telling only half the case to people who know nothing about law, while leaving out any facts that would show his clients in a bad light. Like he'll tell you about the plight of an oyster farmer whose business was shut down by the evil federal government, without mentioning that the farmer in question signed a contract for a fixed-term lease and the government extended the deadline several times before finally enforcing the terms of the lease.
Pick one or more of his cases then go look up the actual court opinions. The facts always seem to be very different from the version he presents to his audiences. He relies on people taking his claims at face value and not doing any fact-checking of their own.
I'm not an expert in Barry Schwartz but I think you're just making his argument stronger.
Focusing on the usage of the term "engineer" when what was in discussion was the traffic lights, which was much important, shows such a shortsightness. Of course, everybody was just doing their job, just following the rules.
Its more of you shouldn't give legal advice, and let people assume you are a lawyer, if you are not a lawyer.
Presumably, if he prefixed this with IANAE, there would be no issue. Well, in this case, a traffic engineer.
But essentially he was defining himself to have greater authority over the subject matter than he actually had, which while here is not really problematic, the act itself often can be.
Jarlstrom was informed that he wasn't entitled to hold himself out as an engineer and agreed not to do so. The reasons not to do that are valid, for the simple reason that it pretends to a level of expertise he does not have, when trying to influence how public infrastructure is run.
I have said many times that Jarlstrom could simply have pitched his idea without claiming to be an engineer. Why didn't he? Probably because people did not listen to him as readily if he did not use that title.
what was in discussion was the traffic lights, which was much important
Why is it so important? Only because Jarlstrom says it is and claims that his solution is world-changing. But this is sales talk. If his solution is really that good, then he should be happy to present it as an amateur, without pretensions to qualifications he does not hold.
His proposal sounds OK, but I know nothing of traffic engineering and can't really evaluate it. Neither, I suspect can anyone else except the one person who posted that they are a licensed professional traffic engineer. It's unclear what, if any, assertions Jarlstrom is making about the benefits of implementing his scheme. Will it save any lives or reduce the number of accidents? No idea. All we have is this: '"hen you make a turn you slow down but that's not accounted for in their solution, so people are getting caught in red light cameras for making safe turns.'
OK, I understand he is not crazy about red light tickets because his wife got one when driving around their hometown, but so what? What is so overwhelmingly urgent about this that the Board should make it heir priority? Why doesn't Jarlstrom have the patience to push his idea as a regular driver without making false claims to qualifications he does not in fact possess? I must reiterate that I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with his amateur traffic engineering endeavours...if he would have clearly labeled them as such.
but he is calling himself an engineer to leverage social credibility that attaches to that professional term. I can share my legal opinions with you all day but no matter how well-formed those opinions are it doesn't alter the fact that I am not qualified to practice law, so the only person I could legally represent in court in myself. It would be dishonest of me to label myself as a lawyer, because people who didn't know any better would easily believe me and might create all sorts of problems for themselves by relying on that false belief.
What's going on here is that you heard a sympathetic story about something you think you understand well - who doesn't understand traffic lights, they are so familiar - with an underdog pitted against the image of a large unresponsive bureaucracy. And that is the point at which pany people in this thread have stopped thinking. Look across the thread, there are even people insisting that Jarlstrom is in fact a licensed engineer, repeatedly, based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever! People are literally inventing facts to uphold their preferred version of the story.
I am a bit depressed to see how easily people are taken in, and abandon reason in favor of their emotional reaction to a piece of obscure public policy. I have no opinion on the right length of traffic light periods (because I don't drive, thank heavens), and I would have no objection to people evaluating Jarlstrom's proposal and adopting it worldwide. But he chose to go about advancing his proposal in a way that he knew would cause problems, and now he is claiming to be a victim after doing something that he knew in advance would create such a problem.
His legal case will go nowhere because he chose to antagonize the very people who were best-positioned to assist him, for no other reason than to inflate his own ego. It would be wise to ask yourself why the story excluded so many important details about the sequence of events, and perhaps to reread pg...
I couldn't care less if he's a licensed engineer or not, if he was calling himself one or not...
I do care whether the traffic lights need fixing, what kind of fixing, if my local traffic lights suffer from the same issue and how it was troubleshooted.
All the rest of this discussion is just wasting everybody's time. And it is only happening because someone didn't have the good judgment to not fine someone who was obviously interested in the collective well being (initially motivated by personal reasons? who cares?).
All rules followed to the letter and society is losing.
You should. If I start calling myself an engineer, and start making noise, about how some bridge or other needs to be retrofitted right this minute... My opinion on the matter is not as valid as that of an actual engineer. And you should probably not conclude that the bridge needs retorfitting, solely on my testimony.
It's like a product manager, with no understanding of how software is built, coming to your daily standup, and telling everyone about what compiler flags they should be using. All the while, calling themselves a programmer/software engineer. If your company isn't insane, it should censure him for that - especially if he said he'll stop doing it.
> Jarlstrom was informed that he wasn't entitled to hold himself out as an engineer and agreed not to do so. The reasons not to do that are valid, for the simple reason that it pretends to a level of expertise he does not have, when trying to influence how public infrastructure is run.
Actually, from the documents provided, he initially made the claim that he held an engineering degree in electronics, which is hardly holding himself out as a registered engineer in the state of Oregon. In a later email he commented to the board that he was an excellent engineer, which may in fact be the case given that he held a degree in engineering. Again, there is no attempt to misrepresent himself as licensed in Oregon.
The first incident is a huge stretch to say he was attempting to mislead the public that he was a registered professional engineer. In fact, if he was a Swedish engineer, regardless of whether they regulate the industry or not, it is a factual statement to say he is a Swedish engineer and is not an attempt to make false claims of his credentials. The are arguing that he cannot speak of his occupation in another country and perform engineering calculations in the state of Oregon. That is clearly a violation of his free speech.
The second statement that he was an excellent engineer is a little more vague, but it is also a factual statement that he is an engineer. He does not ever claim to be a registered professional engineer in the state of Oregon and it is a valid argument that they cannot prevent him from stating his background in engineering.
If he was a doctor in Sweden, it would be perfectly if he still called himself a doctor in Oregon without implying that he was licensed to practice medicine. He would in fact be, after all, a doctor. Essentially what they are doing is equating the performing of engineering calculations (to back up his theory and present to actual engineers) with the practice of medicine. They are attempting to bolster that with two weak (but possibly valid) claims that he was representing himself as a registered professional engineer in Oregon in the process.
The fact is that the laws in this case are vague enough that they could be used to keep someone quiet for whatever reason--perhaps they didn't like the media making them look bad. Ultimately, that would be up to a judge to decide if they are in fact infringing on his first amendment rights.
> I am a bit depressed to see how easily people are taken in, and abandon reason in favor of their emotional reaction to a piece of obscure public policy
I don't see how, all the documents are right there in the article. And seriously, I have read well over thirty condescending comments from you in this thread with your fake intellectualism and it is a bit much. But hey, why don't you refer me to an essay or something.
Except he didn't use it in violation of the law. He wasn't performing professional work, nor was he designing something for construction or any of the other defintions of "practicing engineering"
> The issue that the Board has is that he claimed to be an engineer in a public forum.
That's not the only issue the Board said it had, and not the most important one at that:
> [...] you continued to use the title "engineer" in your communication with Board staff and, of more concern, are the documents you provided that indicate you may have engaged in unlicensed engineering work in Oregon.
(emphasis mine). It's the emphasized clause, and the Board's Final Report, page 6, Section 14[1], that is concerning: he's being punished mainly ("of more concern"!) for doing thinking and speech that, IMO, should not be prohibited.
No he is not being punished for thinking and speech.
You're treating the documents containing his proposal as a completely separate issue from his claim of professional status, but the documents are a doubling down upon his original and repeated false claim of being an engineer, which claim he was warned he should not be making.
If I hold out a mystery pill and invite you to swallow it, how you react will differ considerably depending on whether or not you believe I'm a doctor. This is in no way a commentary on the efficacy of the pill, but only on whether I am likely to have the appropriate medical knowledge that would justify my suggestion.
The Board's Final Report said, in a separate paragraph (14), that because "thinking and speech" (speech about his thinking, not "I'm an engineer")[1] were a violation of the law.
If you're arguing the board doesn't actually think that's a violation unless one also said one is an engineer, great, I've never disagreed with that; but they explicitly said "because [action definition X] you are in violation" and [definition X] pointedly does not include saying anything but "here's a creative application of math and stuff".
1. not the part where he said "I'm an engineer" -- the other paragraphs deal with that
Stop ignoring the context in which the violation occurred. You are treating them as two separate behaviors when one is in fact pendant on the other.
I've seen this in so many legal cases - people file appeals arguing that the law is terribly wrong and their arguments are beautifully logical but for the fact that they are asking the appeal court to forget some very salient fact.
Imagine you go to a party and pee in the punch bowl. It doesn't matter how many times you subsequently offer a great recipe for punch in a demonstrably clean bowl, nobody is going to forget about the fact that you pissed in it the first time. I apologize for employing such a crude metaphor but I am baffled by your refusal to acknowledge the context in which the investigation occurred, so I'm resorting to shocking imagery in the hope of opening your eyes to this.
The court (or similar administrative body) should not have to spell the context out over and over and over again for every bit of the case under discussion. When you read the judgement in a legal case you are expected to hold that idea in your head unless you're explicitly told that X and Y are entirely separate issues. Parsing bits of the decision out of context will lead to errors of interpretation. I don't know how to explain this any more clearly to you.
The final court document does not seem to conform to your argument. Section 13 for example, does conform to your points. It states that "By purporting to be able to perform engineering services or work, Jarlstrom engaged in the practice of engineering...".
However, section 14 is very different. It does not rely on his use of the title of engineer. Instead it states "By reviewing, critiquing, and altering an engineered ITE formula, and submitting the critique and calculations for his modified version of the ITE formula to members of the public for consideration and modification of Beaverton, Oregon's and "worldwide" traffic signals... Jarlstrom applied special knowledge of the mathematical, physical and engineering sciences to such create work as investigation, evaluation, and design in connection with public equipment, processes, and works. Jarlstrom thereby engaged in the practice of engineering under ORS 672.005(1)(b). (...) By engaging in the practice of engineering (specifically, traffic engineering) without registration, Jarlstrom violated ORS 672.020(1), and OAR 820-010-0730(3)(c) on a second occasion."
Section 14 never cites the use of the title "engineer" as relevant for violating ORS 672.020(1), only his engaging in the "practice of engineering." As a practical matter, they may not have brought legal action if he had not used the title, but they certainly believe the law states that disseminating his findings certainly count as "practicing engineering" and is illegal without certification.
Actually, I wonder if the court didn't misinterpret 672.005(1)(b). I've cited it below and it seems to rely on the work in question being used for the purpose of ensuring compliance.
672.005(1) states: "Practice of engineering" or "practice of professional engineering" means doing any of the following:
(b) Applying special knowledge of the mathematical, physical and engineering sciences to such professional services or creative work as consultation, investigation, testimony, evaluation, planning, design and services during construction, manufacture or fabrication for the purpose of ensuring compliance with specifications and design, in connection with any public or private utilities, structures, buildings, machines, equipment, processes, works or projects.
For the last time, these are not separate issues and treating them as such is erroneous. Section 13 establishes the context in which the facts in section 14 were evaluated.
I'm exhausted trying to explain this and frankly annoyed that I've wasted most of my afternoon trying to provide legal insight to people who refuse to listen to reason that contradicts their preconceptions.
WHY do you think section 14 should be interpreted in isolation from section 13? Do you think that makes it like a new function or procedure in which all the scope rules are reset? Why are you ignoring 672.007?
It's really frustrating that programmers seem to think that working with logical constructs makes them lawyers. Maybe you would take me more seriously if I charged you $250/hour?
While I understand your exhaustion, I wonder why they aren't suing companies providing certifications with 'Engineer' in the title. Say, Cisco Certified Engineer, MCSE, etc. It would seem that it would be a far more egregious violation to offer to certify someone as an engineer. Do they not go after the companies claiming to provide these resources as a service? I'm just wondering why it seems so selectively enforced.
> While I understand your exhaustion, I wonder why they aren't suing companies providing certifications with 'Engineer' in the title.
...
quoting from a comment above from someone who is on the same side of the argument as you are.
"By reviewing, critiquing, and altering an engineered ITE formula, and submitting the critique and calculations for his modified version of the ITE formula to members of the public for consideration and modification of Beaverton, Oregon's and "worldwide" traffic signals"
This is another common misunderstanding. There is an "industrial exception" for engineers working under the umbrella of a corporation.
From Texas engineer board code (I think other states are similar):
§ 1001.057. Employee of Private Corporation or Business Entity
(a) This chapter shall not be construed to apply to the activities of a private corporation or other business entity, or the activities of the full-time employees or other personnel under the direct supervision and control of the business entity, on or in connection with:
(1) reasonable modifications to existing buildings, facilities, or other fixtures to real property not accessible to the general public and which are owned, leased, or otherwise occupied by the entity; or
(2) activities related only to the research, development, design, fabrication, production, assembly, integration, or service of products manufactured by the entity.
[Sections (b) and (c) omitted for clarity]
(d) For purposes of this section, “products manufactured by the entity” also includes computer software, firmware, hardware, semiconductor devices, and the production, exploration, and transportation of oil and gas and related products.”
Meaning, engineers can perform engineering work for a company without being licensed.
So I may sell myself as an "Engineer" to a company, but not the government? What if I'm asked my occupation during jury duty? Do I have to say, "code monkey" instead of "Software Engineer"? Perhaps "Meat Popsicle"
He did not give a mystery pill to an unwashed commoner. He wrote to a specialist board who are supposed to be experts. If they claim they were misled by his claims they all should be fired, since they are not competent enough to distinguish between a real engineer and a quack. But looks like they weren't misled at the least, and he wasn't a quack either - they just went on a power trip, probably because he annoyed them by questioning them.
> I am likely to have the appropriate medical knowledge that would justify my suggestion.
One can have relevant knowledge without being an MD. E.g. by being a biochemist. Having license for particular profession is not the same as having knowledge.
During college in Indiana, a couple of us software engineers wanted to take the state's "Professional Engineer" certification exam. Just to see how we'd do. We were told plainly, "you cannot register for the PE exam because the state of Indiana does not recognize software engineers as 'real engineers'". However, if we were Electrical Engineers and wrote embedded software, that would make us a "real engineer". They explained that the certification was primarily designed for Civil and
Mechanical engineers. One guy looked into changing his major temporarily just to take the test but assumed the college administration wouldn't be thrilled about that.
"real engineer" here. Computer Engineer freshly graduated from GT and looking for a job in embedded devices. I can tell you on the other side of the coin it's also annoying to be muddling through a sea of software "engineering" jobs to actually find one for an entry level engineer. I believe the problem is that software engineering started as a buzzword then got its degree paths. Also I am under the impression your curricula is nowhere near as rigorous as required for engineering.
I have been on HN since the beginning of my studies and after a decade of lurking I have made an account. If anyone is hiring CE's or would like to help me out of the good of their heart please PM me. I have had a tough time landing an entry job since medical reasons extended my college time to 7 years.
"curricula is nowhere near as rigorous as required for engineering" this depends on the degree. For a BA that's true, for a BS less so. For a BS, the first 2 years of math and science were virtually identical for all engineering/science/CS student at my uni. That included calc1-3, plus 1-2 semesters each of the "real" physics/bio/chem classes for sicence/engineering students. After that it got a lot more specialized though we still had to take some 400 level maths with the math majors. He was just trying to say "Look I know most people who write to you can't do rudimentary physics calculations, but I most certainly can"
That's outrageously stupid that saying "I am an engineer" is qualified as "unlicensed practice" and that you can be fined by just describing your qualifications. It's not like he opened a company and took a contract pretending to be licensed, he just described his level of knowledge. Special interest groups privatizing common language is outrageous and shameful. It's also an obvious 1st amendment violation and probably the only reason it's not overturned yet is because nobody brought a lawsuit about it - and it'd be probably hard for a private person to support such a lawsuit over $500. Somebody like ACLU should look into it though, if they're still caring about freedom of speech.
Unrelated to the legal issues, what the engineering board is doing seems to be beyond ridiculous. IMHO Mr. Järlström should have informed himself better about the implications of the word "engineer"... but you know the old saying "three felonies a day", this case seems to validate it.
Three felonies a day isn't an old saying, it's a buzzword pushed by an attorney who makes a living from telling highly exaggerated stories about overbearing government that don't stand up under scrutiny. Have a read of the documents in this case and notice how the engineering board courteously informed Jarlstrom of his error without any fines or penalties, only for him to turn around and repeat the behavior he had been warned against.
257 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] threadFor example, if someone owes me money, is it illegal for me to send them a letter, in which I purport to be a lawyer?
--skittles the kitten
1. Who you send it to 2. The purpose of the communication 3. The consequences of the communication 4. Whether it is inter- or intra-state 5. What profession it is
There are other questions that can factor in, but the general rule is: don't lie.
Lying of any form for personal gain is generally a species of fraud, but pretending to have a professional qualification – even without gain – can also incur consequences.
It's not limited to professional qualifications; some places still observe the crime of jactitation, which is pretending to be married.
"However, it is important to make a distinction between a "graduate engineer" and a "professional engineer" or "licensed engineer." A "graduate engineer" is anyone holding a degree in engineering from an accredited four-year university program, but is not licensed to practice or offer services to the public. Unlicensed engineers usually work as employees for a company, or as professors in engineering colleges, where they are governed under the industrial exemption clause. Some states, such as Ohio and New Jersey, prohibit the use of the term "engineer" by an unlicensed person unless it is part of the internal classification of their employer."
So you don't need a license to call yourself an engineer. What this effectively does is permits engineers to perform engineering tasks and be called engineers in their line of work, without having to complete the examinations and all of that jazz. Otherwise, the entire system makes 0 sense. Furthermore, this demonstrates that you may call yourself an engineer if you have graduated from engineering college as you are under granted the title "graduate engineer", and thus can use engineer for shorthand, just as "engineers in training" and "professional engineers" may call themselves engineers for short. I doubt they want to always have to call themselves professional engineers or engineers in training or face a silly fine.
Though I do fully support requiring licensure for some engineering related work. Basically, if you can fuck something up that can cost lives (aviation, bridges, buildings, etc...), you should have a license. Screwing up some code or mixing industrial chemicals normally doesn't fall into that category, though. If it does then yes you should be licensed.
Meanwhile I'll keep on being an engineer all the live long day :)
By sending such a letter, I'm not claiming to be a lawyer, right? But then, what am I doing?
† The law was at least smart enough here to require a partnership structure. Imagine if your fictional lawyer could be "employed by" a real shell corporation!
Wrong. The author of the letter (you) is falsely claiming to be a lawyer. You are also falsely claiming other things, which may or may not have additional consequences.
If so, then would it change anything if I just wrote a letter as myself, saying that I would contact my named, fictitious lawyer and have them draw up a suit against the recipient?
Or, on a completely different (ridiculous) tangent: if a program generates an email claiming that it's a lawyer (not from a template written by a person; from genuine black-box deep-learning text generation, hooked straight up to an email client, without foreknowledge or expectation from the author that this would be the result), has the author of the program committed a crime? I would assume the author in that case more parallels the owner of an animal that did something that would have been a crime if a human did it, but is very blurry without the presumed mens rea humanity brings to the table.
Consider if you change the communication medium from written to oral: if walk up to someone and claim a different name than is actually yours, claim to be a lawyer representing someone else (who you identify with your actual name), and then issue some demands, etc., it's pretty clear that you are claiming to be a lawyer. Changing the medium from oral communication to written doesn't change the essence at all.
I don't think the "walking up to someone" analogy applies, because there's a "me" doing that walking that the person can see, and so by asserting any claim through speech, I'd be attaching the subject of that claim to the person they're seeing—i.e. to myself. But in sending a letter written "as" someone else, there is no "me" from their perspective to attach the claim to. There's only "whoever is named [fake lawyer name]" (nobody) and "whoever sent this letter" (someone else, although I paid them to do it. Coincidentally, if I did have a lawyer, I'd be paying them to do it.)
The letter is a written statement which (whatever else.you may claim in it) is, un fact, from you, asserting various facts, including that the writer of letter is a lawyer.
The claims in the letter are made by the actual author of the letter, not the (potentially fictions) person that they are claiming to be when they wrote it.
> When does a text change from fiction into a claim about reality
When it is presented either with intent that it will be taken as a claim about reality, or when a reasonable person would see it that way. What you write in a novel is an overt work of fiction that no reasonable person, in context, will, in the general case (barring special circumstances), see as a claim of fact. If someone else copies part of it out of context and presents it differently, thats a different story, but has nothing to do with you.
When you send something that you have written to someone with the intent that they view it as what it purports to be on its face, than any knowing falsehoods in it are knowing false claims made by you, the actual person who composed and sent the communication with the intent to deceive.
1. Medical doctors 2. Certified Public Accountants 3. Lawyers 4. Professional Engineers 5. Realtors
Many other professions and certifying agencies will claim that a certification is necessary to practice, and that you should pay them for the privilege, but these are some of the few that are legally protected.
You need a "Professional Engineer" certificate from the NSPE to sign off on certain documents. But note that these certain documents are only used in certain fields, like civil engineering. This certification is not required to be (or to claim to be) a software engineer, electronics engineer, mechanical engineer, product engineer, chemical engineer, etc. For example, I've taken many engineering courses, I have a bachelor's of science in engineering degree, and I practice engineering day-to-day without being a professional engineer. In college, perhaps 5% of my graduating class took the PE exam? And now, few of my coworkers, customers, or suppliers are professional engineers - The two individuals that I can think of transferred into the domain out of civil engineering.
The electronics engineer in the article mistakenly stumbled into the territory of civil engineers who are very, very protective of their licensure, and they overreacted IMO. I don't dispute that if he'd claimed to be an NSPE-licensed Professional Engineer, and signed off on documents which are legally required to be approved by a PE, that he'd be deserving of the punishments associated with this fraud (which are much steeper than $500). But the NSPE does not own the generic term "engineer".
It is possible to be a "real estate agent" (the profession) without being a Realtor. There are licensing requirements, which vary by state, to be a real estate agent.
Perhaps predictably, the people complaining about this feel that it's a form of rent-seeking by incumbents, but none of them have bothered to consider the flip side of the equation which is that bad actors who falsely hold themselves out as licensed professionals can hurt would-be clients in two ways: by directly exploiting them for the cost of services which they are not licensed to provide, and by jeopardizing their longer-term interests in a way that might severely impact them in the future.
Obviously this gentleman is not running around trying to scam Oregonians into paying for cut-price engineering work. But publicly asserting that you are licensed to practice a profession without actually being so, especially when licensure is generally easy to obtain, creates the potential for public misunderstanding. The point of the fine is not to impose a serious financial penalty (hence the token amount of %500) but to draw the public's attention to the fact that anyone holding themselves out as an engineer needs to be licensed within the jurisdiction in which they are practicing - and practicing on your own behalf is still practicing and indeed widely considered by professionals as a kind of marketing.
Considering that the annual fee to practice as an engineer in Oregon is only $75, and that engineering is well established as a profession, I don't think his complaints have a whole lot of merit. Last time I looked engineers are required to take ethics classes as part of their education, and in many jurisdictions keeping ones certification up requires a certain number of hours spent in continuing education each year, same as in the medical and legal professions. If you're not actively practicing your profession then you have, legally speaking, retired and should not present yourself as being currently licensed.
Where is he licensed? Why is he not licensed in Oregon, despite having been timely notified, without penalty, of the requirement to do so if he wished to claim that title? Why did he agree to abide by this requirement then break his agreement within months?
The first linked document in the article states that the defendant is not licensed by any state.
http://braidingfreedom.com/
Architect, Lawyer and Medical Doctor, for sure.
If you say you are a member of a profession and are not obviously fake, most people will take that assertion at face value, and take any of your comments on that subject as truth. Not enforcing licensing requirements is basically an invitation to scammers.
Another example of government employees being incompentant.
Here's one quick example of cities shortening yellow lights for profits.[1]
1. https://www.motorists.org/blog/6-cities-that-were-caught-sho...
* State
* incompetent
As far as I know there is no national accreditation body for the title in the US.
I'm not a PE but I still call myself a software engineer on everything except government forms. As far as the government's concerned I'm a programmer.
I don't think so. It's been a bit since I read up on Visa stuff (and I imagine it doesn't matter to you as an American citizen) but there are distinctions between programmer / software developer / etc.
1. (note the "software" in the list of exams offered) http://ncees.org/engineering/pe/
Heck, you can have a job title of Software Engineer without even having graduated college.
If you wrote an article on cardiology, and you said 'I am a doctor' but you hadn't kept your medical license current, then it would be a false claim, regardless of the fact that your article on cardiology was 100% true. Asserting a privileged status that you do not hold misleads people who rely on the licensure system as a proxy for performing due diligence.
Professionalism is about more than whether people are willing to pay you or not. It involves commitment to uphold particular standards even if it is not in your personal interest to do so.
This is not an attack on math and science no matter how much you want to see it that way. If he had been frank about his amateur status from the outset hew would have had no problem. getting it wrong without bad intentions is nothing serious either, but after he was warned and agreed to abide by the state code, he had no excuse to repeat the behavior.
You can come up with the most interesting scientific result in history, but that does not give you an automatic right to have your discovery implemented by others, does it?
without?
There is too little capitalism in Oregon. In fact, so little that freedom is essentially dead in Oregon. I think running all of the socialists out of the big cities and getting some fire-breathing capitalists with their immigrant sidekicks in would really crack the heads of these totalitarian nut cases. I think of Oregon when the phrase "Lois Lowry's book 'The Giver' was controversial when it came out". A society so addicted to success that it develops a kind of inability to sense its own lack of freedom...sclerotic, really. Hence the fire breathing dragons to melt things down.
The great thing about capitalists is that if they don't like the laws, the laws will get changed! Almost like magic...almost.
Way to pass up a revenue stream.
What a crazy world we've created for ourselves.
I studied "Software Engineering" and have a bachelors degree from Australia. I am a member of the Australian Institute of Engineers (accredited degree).
If I say something like "I am a Software Engineer" when I work in Canada, any other Engineers will get all prickly and go on about how that's not a recognized kind of Engineer, and it's illegal to say-so, blah blah.
Even if I put B. Eng. (Software) after my name they get uppity.
To get my degree accredited in Canada, I must work some huge number of hours as a Software Engineer working with Software Engineers. But of course, there is no such thing in Canada, and so... yeah.
Furthurmore, there are 1316 Computer Engineers. These are not huge numbers, but it is wrong to say that there is no such thing as software engineering in Canada.
Looking at it now, it seems they've dropped that 3 CS course requirement (at the time it was the same first 3 courses as CS majors) and replaced it with 1 required CS course: Computing for Engineers. Everything else, required, is ECE (electrical and computer engineering) with options to satisfy some major electives via CS courses (up to 7 by the hours, but no specific sequence, required to be 3xxx or above meaning a student would need to take at least 2 or 3, depending on present CS curriculum, to even qualify for them with prerequisites).
I picked this one as it seems like the quintessential CMPE program from what I've seen, and it's one of the top engineering schools in the US so it ends up influencing or setting the standard by which other US schools do things. And specifically, it's not halfway. It's often (from a perusal of other schools I'm familiar with) heavily biased towards the hardware side (by requirements, electives of course permit the student some leeway for individual breadth).
EDIT: I did misread the current GT requirements, seems they moved 2 of the programming courses into the ECE department and out of CS.
Also worth noting, professional registrations may not line up exactly with degrees. You don't necessarily need a degree in computer engineering to be a computer engineer. The board would likely find a degree in electrical engineering and a few years of relevant work experience to be sufficient. (Though, this may vary by jurisdiction.)
We exist. I'm a Canadian P.Eng. (Software). I got my experience working on software for controlling unmanned vehicles, and I know a few dozen other Software P.Engs.
Requiring some amount of local experience makes sense, as a major part of engineering is ensuring your project abides by all local laws that govern what you're doing. Getting the required work experience under the supervision of another engineer is a lot rarer than in other disciplines, but on the bright side, that P.Eng. title is required a lot less often than in other disciplines.
With that being said, it certainly is difficult for foreign engineers to get their degrees recognized. If any improvement is to be made on that front, the government almost certainly will need to prod the engineering associations into doing a better job of evaluating foreign credentials.
There are possible career benefits, though they're not huge. The company I left was just starting to require a software engineer on every team to sign off on each release. And, my father convinced me to do the paperwork for the P.Eng. with a story of a raise he missed out on due to not bothering with the P.Eng. despite holding an engineering degree.
Getting one generally requires at least one existing PE who can vouch for the quality of your work which creates a chicken and egg problem if there are no PEs where you work.
Thanks very much, there is hope!
(And thanks to all the other replies too!)
One thing that is especially hilarious is the interview process: the equivalent of the software world's interview process would be to grill an engineer by requiring him to, say, solve a projectile motion with air-resistance problem (fairly common in first-year calculus-based mechanics classes and as review in sophomore/junior year classical mechanics) on the whiteboard and using that as a way to gauge his ability to design whole systems. These interview processes aren't good at looking for engineers, they're good at looking for code monkeys with a high opinion of themselves.
That's my underlying feeling as well. Software Engineering seems like a futuristic discipline, like being a Nanobot Technologist. We're just not there yet - why bother pretending?
The line's blurry, except for places where the law gives a sharper distinction.
(I've got the master of science in civil engineering, not the Microsoft one)
Privacy may be part of the problem -- yes it would suck to publicize everyone's whole history of administrative fines, but making this information public by default would limit corrupt application of the rules.
In my opinion this is a first amendment case. The supreme court created something called 'strict scrutiny' to analyze cases where other laws encroach on the first amendment. Under strict scrutiny, the government needs to prove a compelling state interest to restrict free speech.
Does the state of oregon have a compelling interest in preventing this person from informing a state agency, via private correspondence, of a safety-related calibration issue in their traffic light system?
If you think so, interested to hear your argument.
Did you read the Board's complaint? At first the asked the Board to investigate the city even though the Board had no jurisdiction to do so. they advised him of this and also cautioned him not to advertise himself as an engineer, in accordance with Oregon's code. He agreed, but then went on to write to various government and media entities promoting his idea and promoting himself as an engineer, before asserting again to the Board that he was an engineer - the very same Board to whom he had given his assurance that he would not hold himself out as such.
He could have put the exact same information and proposals out in public, saying 'I'm not an engineer, but I believe I have come up with a great solution to this traffic problem' and he would have been fine. It's simply not true for you to assert that they're trying to censor his ideas.
"I, JB Reefer, am God, command you to stop driving. I am the king of all engineers, president of space, etc etc etc"
and it doesn't matter. You really do get to say whatever the fuck you want in this country, as long as it doesn't cause direct harm to someone else. There's no "this doesn't apply to job title" caveat.
The Supreme Court disagrees.
Similarly, simply saying "i am an engineer" is obviously not a crime. Students do it all the time, despite not being licensed. Using it to lend credence to your ideas around traffic lights, however, may be a different story. I think thats the crux of the dispute.
There are more limitations but that's an easy and possibly counterintuitive example.
It's a reference to dicta in that case, which would be dubious to cite as meaningful even had Shenck not been overturned.
I doubt that these laws are going away any time soon. Perhaps modified as more and more influential people see "programming" as "engineering", but doubtful that they'll go away for things like civil/mechanical/electrical infrastructure.
[1] http://laist.com/2016/01/30/fake_civil_engineers_may_have_bu...
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-...
It's a meaningless saying that doesn't actually have any real bearing on the law or the first amendment.
Other examples besides claiming to be a doctor/lawyer while giving advice include: remarks that constitute credible threats to someone's life.
By the way, and appropriate to this thread, I am not a lawyer.
http://wjactv.com/news/local/huntingdon-county-woman-exposed...
No, he's not according to the violations cited in Final Order, page 6, section heading #14; in particular:
...and summarizing:If he had merely submitted the "critique and calculations" for "consideration" as a concerned citizen, he would have not gotten a fine. Simply put, he called himself an engineer and suggested that public infrastructure be changed. In Oregon, when you're not licensed by the state, you can't use the title "Engineer", and you definitely don't want to use it while trying to suggest modifications to public infrastructure.
I'm not equating the two in terms of "I believe both situations are completely just"... but doing what he did is akin to a thief walking himself into the police station. The purpose of the Board of Engineers in most states is not to decide what is "good engineering practice" and what is "bad engineering practice", it's to regulate licensure and set the bar for who is qualified to be an "Engineer" in the eyes of the state. He mis-navigated the American system, for better or worse, and paid a fine that is meant to dissuade people from doing things like this:
http://laist.com/2016/01/30/fake_civil_engineers_may_have_bu...
I hear you, and agree that when he says "I'm an engineer", we have a certain set of laws that apply to that speech.
I'm saying there is another aspect which is the the crux of the reply-to-top-level comment to which I objected: that Final Report is saying "doing [math and stuff] on [public things] is engineering, and you did [math and stuff], so you're doing engineering without a license". I don't think my "the Final Report is saying..." is unfair: check the Final Report sections 8,9, and 10.
I bet there are a lot of confounding issues in this particular case, but, very narrowly, what I'm saying is that using publicly-available data and speaking (without saying "I'm an engineer") of applications of "special knowledge of the mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences" cannot be illegal or fine-able, yet this is pretty literally what sentence three of section 13 (Final Order, Page 6) says is happening.
He can't unring that bell because he already accepted a warning (absent any fine or penalty) and agreed to abide by the Code on not calling himself an engineer and then repeatedly broke that agreement, so he doesn't get to keep selling his proposed traffic solution because of his demonstrated bad faith.
It's like someone who called themselves a doctor and turned out to have no medical qualifications being enjoined from wearing a white coat and a stethoscope and hanging around hospitals offering unsolicited medical advice.
You are mistaken: I told you in an earlier reply that the first linked document states he is not licensed to practice in any state.
"Jarlstrom is not now, and never has been, registered to practice engineering in Oregon, or any other state in the United States. Jarlstrom has claimed to be a Swedish engineer. However, engineering is not a regulated profession in Sweden. No licensure, registration or certification is offered or required to practice engineering in Sweden"
[0] - https://www.scribd.com/embeds/346354146/content?start_page=1...
Indeed there is a whole set of exceptions related to "Exception to application of ORS 672.002 to 672.325"[0].
You may be interested in ORS 672.060(6)(a and b):
Which basically covers the run of the mills, "I'm doing math and engineering in my backyard, or my friend's front yard, or for my neighbor".Indeed, this is one of the affirmative defenses that he tried using, but was rejected.
Basically, you can't just stop at a definition in law, you have to read the full law to know what the law says.
[0] - https://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/672.060
[0] - https://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/672.005
https://www.law.georgetown.edu/academics/academic-programs/l...
As a simple example, if you have a faint and I ask you if you're all right, what you're feeling etc., that doesn't mean I'm practicing medicine without a license despite the diagnostic nature of my questions.
I mean, if he hadn't said he was an engineer to Licensed Engineers many times, I agree nobody would have bothered. But now that they've bothered, their justifications matter.
You are incorrect. See my other post with a link to the clear exceptions baked directly into the law.
If what you said were true, then he literally would not have had an affirmative defense to plead at all, which is plainly wrong as the final order specifically notes his pleading of 2 affirmative defenses.
You can find these analysis of those affirmative defenses by reviewing the sections of the final order starting at 19
"by [critiquing an engineering formula] and submitting the critique [...] to members of the public" [...he...] thereby engaged in the practice of engineering [...] specifically, traffic engineering [...and thus] violated ORS 672.020(1), 672.045(1) and OAR 820-010-0730(3)(c)".
I agree his affirmative defenses are inadequate, but I'm not taking issue with the analysis of his defense. I simply am pointing out the justification used in Paragraph 14 is concerning. ORS672.005(1)(b) is way too broad.
[0] - https://www.scribd.com/document/346354146/mats4#from_embed [1] - https://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/672.007 [2] - https://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/672.005
You could be right if that false claim hadn't happened. But it did, and everything subsequent has to be evaluated within that context. Think of the difference between global and local variables, and the sort of bugs you get if you ignore scope rules (I'm guessing you're a coder, ignore if that's not the case).
If "professional services or creative work" could be read as "services or creative work, either of which are done for money," perhaps it would be okay?
'As used in ORS 672.002 (Definitions for ORS 672.002 to 672.325) to 672.325 (Civil penalties), unless the context requires otherwise:'
It's terrifying because you are reading bits of it out of context and extrapolating incorrectly to the broadest scope imaginable. I perform some of the activities on this list on almost a daily basis just in the normal course of making things and being an artist (the old-fashioned variety slapping paint on canvas). I have exactly zero fear of ever being prosecuted for unlicensed engineering activities.
How you should be reading it: ORS 672.005 described things that an engineer does as part of their work. Then you go on to look at ORS 672.007 which talks about how
https://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/672.007You are not going to get fined just for calculating the hypotenuse of a triangle in public. In programming terms, you're worrying about the value of a variable without considering its scope.
Forgot to mention that all emphases are added by me.
If the argument is "he said he was an 'engineer' and he isn't licensed", that's fine. And the Board's Final Report contains a lot of language establishing that, and for that he can be fined.
But the Board's Report goes out of its way to say that ORS 672.005(c) and ORS 672.002 define "practicing engineering" as quite close to just "calculating the hypotenuse of a triangle in public", and that just practicing engineering in this manner without registration is not allowed. Check Section 14 of the Final Report. It makes no reference to "purporting to be an engineer": it's "by [critiquing an engineering formula] and submitting the critique [...] to members of the public" [...he...] thereby engaged in the practice of engineering [...] specifically, traffic engineering [...and thus] violated ORS 672.020(1), 672.045(1) and OAR 820-010-0730(3)(c)".
If you tell people you are not a doctor, and you do doctor things, then there's no misunderstanding, and nothing to fine
But if you tell people you are a doctor (or let people think you are), when you are not, and you do doctory things, then there's trouble.
It seems reasonable to me that it requires both the misunderstanding and the potential to create public harm for it to be a crime/fine-able.
In your metaphor "doctor" is a protected term in many jurisdictions, so merely claiming to be a medical doctor is a crime. And practising medicine without a licence is similarly illegal, even if you make it clear that you're not a doctor.
But instead of pitching his idea as a simple concerned resident he went back to claiming to be an engineer a couple of months later. That's not a mistake because the issue had already been clearly explained to him. He's not a victim.
It's quite difficult to read, and even harder for mobile users. It might be better to use > or asterisks for quoting.
For anyone else who was trying to read the quoted parts, here they are:
He's perfectly at liberty to [share the information]
No, he's not according to the violations cited in Final Order, page 6, section heading #14; in particular:
> By reviewing, critiquing, and altering an engineered ITE formula, and submitting the critique and calculations [...] to members of the public for consideration and modification of Beaverton, Oregon's and worldwide traffic signals, which signals are public equipment, processes and works, Jarlstrom applied special knowledge of the mathematical, physical and engineering sciences to such creative work as investigation, evaluation, and design in connection with public equipment, processes, and works. Jarlstrom thereby engaged in the practice of engineering under ORS 672.005(1)(b).
...and summarizing:
> By engaging the practice of engineering [...] without registration, Jarlstrom violated [laws]. [...] By again providing the public with his traffic engineering calculations for the modification of Beaverton's traffic signal timing, Jarlstrom again engaged in the practice of engineering and, specifically, the practice of traffic engineering. He thereby violated [laws] on a third occasion. By providing his publicly released traffic engineering calculations to the sheriff of the 20 county where he advised changes in traffic signals, Jarlstrom again purported to be authorized to engage in, and did engage in, the practice of engineering. He, therefore, violated [laws] on third and fourth occasions.
Another instance I can recount is here where a woman was banned from touching horses.
http://reason.com/blog/2017/02/17/woman-could-go-to-jail-for...
I don't think most software devs should require licensing, but they're not doing what I and many others would consider 'real' engineering. At least, their mistakes don't often have serious impact on people. We're not talking about that here though, we're talking about civil engineering.
Exaggeration never, ever makes a legal argument more convincing.
Moral: do business in a different state.
Seems incredibly petty.
Also, if his job title includes "engineer" the board is going to have a very difficult time justifying the case.
And.... this is a civil matter. His best option is to get a good lawyer and just ignore them.
Yet another reason for small government.
'The board shouldn't exist' is a novel proposition. I guess you can't understand what interest the state might have in the ability to commission accurate land surveys and reliable public works. Almost makes you wonder how these things come into being in the first place, doesn't it?
Insofar as government is a provider of public goods in the form of infrastructure I would certainly say that it has a legitimate interest in maintaining standards so as to avoid wasting public money.
It's pretty cute how the same yuppies who are supportive of strict regulation are lining up to praise childhood programming courses. By the time our children are grown, programming will be illegal without a license - ushered in by the mayhem created by hipsters programming insecure IoT devices. These are the same people who praise curiosity out of one side of their mouth, but insist no one should practice cryptography because it's far too hard for mortals to understand.
I would be delighted if academic America would get off it's high horse. You're starting to look an awful lot like Hollywood circa 1998.
However, that is the problem - people shouldn't be pushed around by bureaucratic functionaries because he hasn't paid the cover charge to use the title that is appropriate for his trade. He was sending an intelligible email with genuine, well researched claims - he was disrespected, fined and suppressed.
I wonder how many emails Oregon is receiving now from engineers?
Did you read any of the primary source documents in the article? If not then this is going to be a waste of time. If so, please reconcile your arguments with the fact that Jarlstrom initiated contact with the board in an attempt to push a city authority around, and then broke the agreement he made to abide by Oregon's code when it was explained to him absent any kind of bureaucratic sanction.
The Board warned Järlström that he was in violation of the Law and asked him to stop claiming to be an engineer, to which he agreed. It was later, when he continued to claim to be an engineer that legal action was taken.
It is also of note, and stated in the Board's documentation of the case, that Sweden has no legal standards for engineers of any kind.
Finally, full disclosure, I am a registered and licensed traffic engineer.
[edit] grammar
Had he sent the letter/formula/math/suggestions to the local state university civil engineering department, the local/state Dept. of Transportation, or the local/state representative, the response would have fallen on less deaf ears, and his use of the title would have likely gone less noticed.
Reminds me of this talk by Barry Schwartz: https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_our_loss_of_wisd...
Barry Schwartz specializes in telling only half the case to people who know nothing about law, while leaving out any facts that would show his clients in a bad light. Like he'll tell you about the plight of an oyster farmer whose business was shut down by the evil federal government, without mentioning that the farmer in question signed a contract for a fixed-term lease and the government extended the deadline several times before finally enforcing the terms of the lease.
Pick one or more of his cases then go look up the actual court opinions. The facts always seem to be very different from the version he presents to his audiences. He relies on people taking his claims at face value and not doing any fact-checking of their own.
Focusing on the usage of the term "engineer" when what was in discussion was the traffic lights, which was much important, shows such a shortsightness. Of course, everybody was just doing their job, just following the rules.
Presumably, if he prefixed this with IANAE, there would be no issue. Well, in this case, a traffic engineer.
But essentially he was defining himself to have greater authority over the subject matter than he actually had, which while here is not really problematic, the act itself often can be.
Jarlstrom was informed that he wasn't entitled to hold himself out as an engineer and agreed not to do so. The reasons not to do that are valid, for the simple reason that it pretends to a level of expertise he does not have, when trying to influence how public infrastructure is run.
I have said many times that Jarlstrom could simply have pitched his idea without claiming to be an engineer. Why didn't he? Probably because people did not listen to him as readily if he did not use that title.
what was in discussion was the traffic lights, which was much important
Why is it so important? Only because Jarlstrom says it is and claims that his solution is world-changing. But this is sales talk. If his solution is really that good, then he should be happy to present it as an amateur, without pretensions to qualifications he does not hold.
His proposal sounds OK, but I know nothing of traffic engineering and can't really evaluate it. Neither, I suspect can anyone else except the one person who posted that they are a licensed professional traffic engineer. It's unclear what, if any, assertions Jarlstrom is making about the benefits of implementing his scheme. Will it save any lives or reduce the number of accidents? No idea. All we have is this: '"hen you make a turn you slow down but that's not accounted for in their solution, so people are getting caught in red light cameras for making safe turns.'
OK, I understand he is not crazy about red light tickets because his wife got one when driving around their hometown, but so what? What is so overwhelmingly urgent about this that the Board should make it heir priority? Why doesn't Jarlstrom have the patience to push his idea as a regular driver without making false claims to qualifications he does not in fact possess? I must reiterate that I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with his amateur traffic engineering endeavours...if he would have clearly labeled them as such.
but he is calling himself an engineer to leverage social credibility that attaches to that professional term. I can share my legal opinions with you all day but no matter how well-formed those opinions are it doesn't alter the fact that I am not qualified to practice law, so the only person I could legally represent in court in myself. It would be dishonest of me to label myself as a lawyer, because people who didn't know any better would easily believe me and might create all sorts of problems for themselves by relying on that false belief.
What's going on here is that you heard a sympathetic story about something you think you understand well - who doesn't understand traffic lights, they are so familiar - with an underdog pitted against the image of a large unresponsive bureaucracy. And that is the point at which pany people in this thread have stopped thinking. Look across the thread, there are even people insisting that Jarlstrom is in fact a licensed engineer, repeatedly, based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever! People are literally inventing facts to uphold their preferred version of the story.
I am a bit depressed to see how easily people are taken in, and abandon reason in favor of their emotional reaction to a piece of obscure public policy. I have no opinion on the right length of traffic light periods (because I don't drive, thank heavens), and I would have no objection to people evaluating Jarlstrom's proposal and adopting it worldwide. But he chose to go about advancing his proposal in a way that he knew would cause problems, and now he is claiming to be a victim after doing something that he knew in advance would create such a problem.
His legal case will go nowhere because he chose to antagonize the very people who were best-positioned to assist him, for no other reason than to inflate his own ego. It would be wise to ask yourself why the story excluded so many important details about the sequence of events, and perhaps to reread pg...
I do care whether the traffic lights need fixing, what kind of fixing, if my local traffic lights suffer from the same issue and how it was troubleshooted.
All the rest of this discussion is just wasting everybody's time. And it is only happening because someone didn't have the good judgment to not fine someone who was obviously interested in the collective well being (initially motivated by personal reasons? who cares?).
All rules followed to the letter and society is losing.
It's like a product manager, with no understanding of how software is built, coming to your daily standup, and telling everyone about what compiler flags they should be using. All the while, calling themselves a programmer/software engineer. If your company isn't insane, it should censure him for that - especially if he said he'll stop doing it.
Actually, from the documents provided, he initially made the claim that he held an engineering degree in electronics, which is hardly holding himself out as a registered engineer in the state of Oregon. In a later email he commented to the board that he was an excellent engineer, which may in fact be the case given that he held a degree in engineering. Again, there is no attempt to misrepresent himself as licensed in Oregon.
The first incident is a huge stretch to say he was attempting to mislead the public that he was a registered professional engineer. In fact, if he was a Swedish engineer, regardless of whether they regulate the industry or not, it is a factual statement to say he is a Swedish engineer and is not an attempt to make false claims of his credentials. The are arguing that he cannot speak of his occupation in another country and perform engineering calculations in the state of Oregon. That is clearly a violation of his free speech.
The second statement that he was an excellent engineer is a little more vague, but it is also a factual statement that he is an engineer. He does not ever claim to be a registered professional engineer in the state of Oregon and it is a valid argument that they cannot prevent him from stating his background in engineering.
If he was a doctor in Sweden, it would be perfectly if he still called himself a doctor in Oregon without implying that he was licensed to practice medicine. He would in fact be, after all, a doctor. Essentially what they are doing is equating the performing of engineering calculations (to back up his theory and present to actual engineers) with the practice of medicine. They are attempting to bolster that with two weak (but possibly valid) claims that he was representing himself as a registered professional engineer in Oregon in the process.
The fact is that the laws in this case are vague enough that they could be used to keep someone quiet for whatever reason--perhaps they didn't like the media making them look bad. Ultimately, that would be up to a judge to decide if they are in fact infringing on his first amendment rights.
> I am a bit depressed to see how easily people are taken in, and abandon reason in favor of their emotional reaction to a piece of obscure public policy
I don't see how, all the documents are right there in the article. And seriously, I have read well over thirty condescending comments from you in this thread with your fake intellectualism and it is a bit much. But hey, why don't you refer me to an essay or something.
That's not the only issue the Board said it had, and not the most important one at that:
> [...] you continued to use the title "engineer" in your communication with Board staff and, of more concern, are the documents you provided that indicate you may have engaged in unlicensed engineering work in Oregon.
(emphasis mine). It's the emphasized clause, and the Board's Final Report, page 6, Section 14[1], that is concerning: he's being punished mainly ("of more concern"!) for doing thinking and speech that, IMO, should not be prohibited.
1. https://www.scribd.com/document/346354146/mats4#from_embed
You're treating the documents containing his proposal as a completely separate issue from his claim of professional status, but the documents are a doubling down upon his original and repeated false claim of being an engineer, which claim he was warned he should not be making.
If I hold out a mystery pill and invite you to swallow it, how you react will differ considerably depending on whether or not you believe I'm a doctor. This is in no way a commentary on the efficacy of the pill, but only on whether I am likely to have the appropriate medical knowledge that would justify my suggestion.
If you're arguing the board doesn't actually think that's a violation unless one also said one is an engineer, great, I've never disagreed with that; but they explicitly said "because [action definition X] you are in violation" and [definition X] pointedly does not include saying anything but "here's a creative application of math and stuff".
1. not the part where he said "I'm an engineer" -- the other paragraphs deal with that
I've seen this in so many legal cases - people file appeals arguing that the law is terribly wrong and their arguments are beautifully logical but for the fact that they are asking the appeal court to forget some very salient fact.
Imagine you go to a party and pee in the punch bowl. It doesn't matter how many times you subsequently offer a great recipe for punch in a demonstrably clean bowl, nobody is going to forget about the fact that you pissed in it the first time. I apologize for employing such a crude metaphor but I am baffled by your refusal to acknowledge the context in which the investigation occurred, so I'm resorting to shocking imagery in the hope of opening your eyes to this.
The court (or similar administrative body) should not have to spell the context out over and over and over again for every bit of the case under discussion. When you read the judgement in a legal case you are expected to hold that idea in your head unless you're explicitly told that X and Y are entirely separate issues. Parsing bits of the decision out of context will lead to errors of interpretation. I don't know how to explain this any more clearly to you.
However, section 14 is very different. It does not rely on his use of the title of engineer. Instead it states "By reviewing, critiquing, and altering an engineered ITE formula, and submitting the critique and calculations for his modified version of the ITE formula to members of the public for consideration and modification of Beaverton, Oregon's and "worldwide" traffic signals... Jarlstrom applied special knowledge of the mathematical, physical and engineering sciences to such create work as investigation, evaluation, and design in connection with public equipment, processes, and works. Jarlstrom thereby engaged in the practice of engineering under ORS 672.005(1)(b). (...) By engaging in the practice of engineering (specifically, traffic engineering) without registration, Jarlstrom violated ORS 672.020(1), and OAR 820-010-0730(3)(c) on a second occasion."
Section 14 never cites the use of the title "engineer" as relevant for violating ORS 672.020(1), only his engaging in the "practice of engineering." As a practical matter, they may not have brought legal action if he had not used the title, but they certainly believe the law states that disseminating his findings certainly count as "practicing engineering" and is illegal without certification.
Actually, I wonder if the court didn't misinterpret 672.005(1)(b). I've cited it below and it seems to rely on the work in question being used for the purpose of ensuring compliance.
672.005(1) states: "Practice of engineering" or "practice of professional engineering" means doing any of the following:
(b) Applying special knowledge of the mathematical, physical and engineering sciences to such professional services or creative work as consultation, investigation, testimony, evaluation, planning, design and services during construction, manufacture or fabrication for the purpose of ensuring compliance with specifications and design, in connection with any public or private utilities, structures, buildings, machines, equipment, processes, works or projects.
I'm exhausted trying to explain this and frankly annoyed that I've wasted most of my afternoon trying to provide legal insight to people who refuse to listen to reason that contradicts their preconceptions.
WHY do you think section 14 should be interpreted in isolation from section 13? Do you think that makes it like a new function or procedure in which all the scope rules are reset? Why are you ignoring 672.007?
It's really frustrating that programmers seem to think that working with logical constructs makes them lawyers. Maybe you would take me more seriously if I charged you $250/hour?
...
quoting from a comment above from someone who is on the same side of the argument as you are.
"By reviewing, critiquing, and altering an engineered ITE formula, and submitting the critique and calculations for his modified version of the ITE formula to members of the public for consideration and modification of Beaverton, Oregon's and "worldwide" traffic signals"
Seriously. what. the. fuck. is wrong with you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
From Texas engineer board code (I think other states are similar): § 1001.057. Employee of Private Corporation or Business Entity (a) This chapter shall not be construed to apply to the activities of a private corporation or other business entity, or the activities of the full-time employees or other personnel under the direct supervision and control of the business entity, on or in connection with: (1) reasonable modifications to existing buildings, facilities, or other fixtures to real property not accessible to the general public and which are owned, leased, or otherwise occupied by the entity; or (2) activities related only to the research, development, design, fabrication, production, assembly, integration, or service of products manufactured by the entity. [Sections (b) and (c) omitted for clarity] (d) For purposes of this section, “products manufactured by the entity” also includes computer software, firmware, hardware, semiconductor devices, and the production, exploration, and transportation of oil and gas and related products.”
Meaning, engineers can perform engineering work for a company without being licensed.
> I am likely to have the appropriate medical knowledge that would justify my suggestion.
One can have relevant knowledge without being an MD. E.g. by being a biochemist. Having license for particular profession is not the same as having knowledge.
I have been on HN since the beginning of my studies and after a decade of lurking I have made an account. If anyone is hiring CE's or would like to help me out of the good of their heart please PM me. I have had a tough time landing an entry job since medical reasons extended my college time to 7 years.
Unrelated to the legal issues, what the engineering board is doing seems to be beyond ridiculous. IMHO Mr. Järlström should have informed himself better about the implications of the word "engineer"... but you know the old saying "three felonies a day", this case seems to validate it.