Can Software Engineers become certified Professional Engineers (PE)?
This question was closed by the community as off-topic career advice back in June 2014. It has not received any edits aside from retagging, but now it's suddenly one vote away from being reopened and one vote away from being deleted at the same time. To me, that screams "we need to sit down and talk about this."
I assume the motivation for the delete votes is the obvious one: Most certification questions are not valuable content for the same reasons as other career advice questions, and leaving them around creates broken windows.
I believe the motivation for the reopen votes comes from what Thomas Owens said in chat the other day. Here's the full conversation. Here are the relevant sound bytes:
I'm not sure if the [Professional Engineers] one can even be justified as being closed.
The problem with many of the certification questions was that they were either primarily opinion based (should I get certification X?) or time-sensitive (about a particular test that changes).
I suppose they could decide to stop offering [the certification]. But that doesn't happen often.
And it probably won't, since in Texas and Florida, you need to pass that exam to call yourself an engineer.
Since I know absolutely nothing about ceritifications of any type, aside from the folk wisdom that they seem to be a waste of time for most software developers, I am unable to meaningfully agree or disagree with this argument, so I haven't voted on the question either way.
What does everyone else think?