On 7/5/22 18:27, Glenn Kelley wrote:
I fully expect this to come down to someone needing to be an "engineer."
The term "Professional Engineer" is a protected term in all 50 US states to my knowledge. It requires the qualifications and licensure you'd expect with the typical path being ABET engineering curriculum, passing the FE, interning for some number of years, attribution of character from some existing PEs, then passing the PE exam and receiving the state-adorned license. The use of the term "engineer" is much more vauge and generally unprotected in the USA. Lots of people have job titles with the word in it that wouldn't even fall under typical professional engineering guidelines in the most aggressive interpretation. However, the PE board in some states can be pretty aggressive about the whole "practicing professional engineering without the proper license", and part of the guidelines they use to make that determination is if you use the term "engineer" to describe yourself. The feds have quality steered clear of the whole PE thing in codes/laws since it's essentially entirely state-run. The use of the term here might be an oversight that should be corrected as it doesn't seem that they intended to require a state-licensed "Professional Engineer", at least if the person doing the approval of the report is an agent of the company submitting it, nor did they define the term as such. A lot of "engineering" happens under the so-called "industrial exemption" where things are going to cross state lines and therefore aren't under the purview of the state licensing board, but infrastructure-based/wireline comm systems would likely not fall under that, so it comes down to if your state defines the operation of such systems (not necessarily the physical design and emplacement of them) as an engineering activity. Note that I am not a PE, though I have passed the FE. This shouldn't be construed as legal advice much less advice to your specific situation.