[dsfyu404ed]

The handyman spends 20min thinking about how to solve the problem.

The civil engineer spends 20min thinking about how to solve the problem and 20-days making sure there's no way whoever signs his paycheck is going to be told by a court to pay out a bunch of money if something goes sideways.

An professional engineer is basically just a lawyer for the laws of physics. You're not paying for his ability to come up with a solution. Anyone can read the books and do that. You're paying for the fact that other people take that solution seriously.

[hinkley]

There was some CivE professor that people liked to quote who talked about how he had no qualms flunking people from his classes because a degree in Civil Engineering was a license to kill.

If you let dumbasses through the system, they will build a pedestrian bridge in a hotel lobby that fails and kills a hundred people at a party.

[vincnetas]

For those who didn't catch the reference : Hyatt Regency Walkway Collapse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnvGwFegbC8

[gmueckl]

A lot of the most serious software engineering work that I have done had much the same ratio: coding the a solution that mostly works was easy. Making sure that it is robust against all kinds of failures (CPU, RAM, bus/external device failure, random bit flips etc.[0]) and does the right thing was a lot of work.

[0] The system I worked on was hardened against all of that and some more failure modes.