At least in civil, the reason is because the professional engineer (PE) stamps all plans and assumes responsibility for said plans by doing so. Plans cannot be built without a stamp. This is the case because someone has to be found liable if a bridge should kill people, and it shouldn’t be the technicians, designers or EITs under the PE, because they don’t make nearly as much. With great pay comes great liability.
This makes sense for civil, structural, electrical engineering, and similar. For software engineering though, it doesn’t make sense to me unless it’s for software specifically meant for something critically important for life or safety, like embedded software for industrial safety sensors and shutoff relays, medical monitoring, etc. And that kind of equipment I would expect to have the responsibility for signing off as safe by software-adjacent people like QA testers and non-software people like environmental health and safety officers, lawyers, and so forth.
At least in civil, the reason is because the professional engineer (PE) stamps all plans and assumes responsibility for said plans by doing so. Plans cannot be built without a stamp. This is the case because someone has to be found liable if a bridge should kill people, and it shouldn’t be the technicians, designers or EITs under the PE, because they don’t make nearly as much. With great pay comes great liability.
This makes sense for civil, structural, electrical engineering, and similar. For software engineering though, it doesn’t make sense to me unless it’s for software specifically meant for something critically important for life or safety, like embedded software for industrial safety sensors and shutoff relays, medical monitoring, etc. And that kind of equipment I would expect to have the responsibility for signing off as safe by software-adjacent people like QA testers and non-software people like environmental health and safety officers, lawyers, and so forth.