[Aloisius]

In the US, Professional Engineers are licensed through the state and are legally responsible for their work. If you engineer a bridge and it falls down because of a design problem, you are the one at fault.

Until software engineers become legally responsible for crashes/data loss/etc. of their software and can be sued out of existence or go to prison because negligence, they will not demand the same respect that other engineers do.

[splicer]

Apparently Texas, like Canada, considers software engineering a proper discipline of engineering, subject to the same regulations as other engineering disciplines: http://sce.uhcl.edu/helm/SWEBOK_IEEE/papers/10%20reprint%205...