You clearly have a lot more experience than me- I’m fairly fresh out the gate. Like you, though, I work in a field where licensure isn’t super relevant (manufacturing).

It was drilled into my head in school and by my dad (cheme but does civil work and is on the committee that writes the cheme PE) that that for some domains, like civil and chem, it’s nigh impossible to find work without a PE (even entry level often requires at least the EIT accreditation).

Our system is, frankly, still very wild-west in terms of accountability for engineers in emerging fields.

It’s deeply unfortunate that your experience with the accountability side of things went the way it did. That’s another thing that they drilled into my head at school- if you sign a drawing and that park killed or hurt someone, the victims could call on you in a court of law to explain or even include you as a defendant in the suit. Does that always happen? Obviously not, but at least the possibly is there I guess.

Agreed, but software has already had life-safety-critical and massively financially impactful roles in society for 50+ years now, and I see precious little progress toward formal accountability.

Fully agreed here, I was just struggling to think of older life-critical examples after travelling for 22 hours lol (long day yesterday).