This is a very good thing that I wish the US would adopt. We have people with three months total programming experience jumping from sales jobs to programming and calling themselves engineers. It's an insult to those who actually perform engineering professionally.
It might be a good thing if university graduates from computer science programs could apply for software engineering positions... Consequently, most educated hiring managers don't hire for engineers, which brings us back to square one.
No, it's not. In practice it is a way to give professional associations a monopoly and force people to pay fees to them (because it is membership of those associations which give you the ability to call yourself whatever, not what you completed at university)
Fortunately there are multiple job titles in computing that mean the same thing, so this should never be a real problem in computing.
Yes, yes it definitely is. While professional engineering certification might be a monopolistic moneymaking scheme, it also verifies that an engineer has some idea that he knows what the hell he's doing in a way that graduating from a university can't. Standardized tests have a real and valuable purpose. I'm more comfortable knowing that an engineer graduating from Western State has an independent source to test his knowledge against. Accreditation alone can't do this.
AVG: Software developer : 58K
Also in Quebec, you cannot call yourself an engineer unless you want to an engineer school and are part of their order.