Wayne Nutt is an engineer. He graduated with a degree in engineering from the University of Iowa in 1967, and he promptly went to work as an engineer. He spent most of his time working in North Carolina, mostly for DuPont, using his expertise to do things like designing piping systems and helping with international technology licensing. Since his retirement in 2013, Wayne has not done any engineering—he hasn’t designed or built things—but he is still an engineer at heart, and so he talks about engineering a lot: When he spots math errors in public documents, he speaks up. When he thinks people are mischaracterizing engineering reports, he speaks out. And when he can answer a question that he thinks is important, he answers it.
And that is what has gotten him into trouble. Wayne never needed a license to work as an engineer. Because he worked for big manufacturers for his whole career, everything Wayne did (like everything most engineers do) fell under North Carolina’s “industrial exemption” and did not require a license. But according to the North Carolina Board of Examiners for Engineers and Surveyors, talking about the sort of work Wayne did does require a license.
Wayne’s trouble started when he volunteered to testify as an expert witness in a case his son, an attorney, was litigating. The case involved a piping system in a housing development that allegedly caused flooding in nearby areas, and Wayne, who had designed plenty of pipes in his day, volunteered to testify about the volume of fluid that pipe could be expected to carry. Wayne still had a copy of the leading sourcebook on his bookshelf, and the analysis itself seemed pretty easy—at least for Wayne.
But it was also—according to the Board—illegal. After Wayne’s deposition in the case, where he truthfully testified that he was not (and never had been) a licensed engineer, someone complained to the Board that he was practicing engineering without a license, which is a criminal misdemeanor.
It might seem impossible to “practice” engineering by sitting in a conference room answering questions, but, shockingly, the Board seems to think Wayne crossed a line. The Board’s position is that offering any testimony that requires “engineering knowledge” is illegal without a license—even if someone truthfully discloses their credentials, and even if a judge wants to hear the testimony.
But that is wrong. In this country, we rely on people to decide who they want to listen to. We do not rely on government to decide who gets to speak. The Board’s position gets that important principle backwards. That is why Wayne has joined forces with the Institute for Justice to file a major First Amendment lawsuit against the Board, designed to vindicate the basic principle that the First Amendment protects our right to hear useful speech on difficult topics and that the Board cannot silence Wayne simply because his opinions are based on his knowledge of engineering.
North Carolina's Board of Engineering suing retired engineer for correcting their math - 2+2=5
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MarvinTheParanoidAndroid
This will all end in tears, I just know it.
True & Honest Fan
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- 24 de Feb, 2015
First Amendment trumps all, fuck faggot bureaucracy, fuck faggot exceptions, ect.
Daily reminder that academics want to insist that 2+2=5 because they can finesse a stupid situation where 2+2 could equal five by rounding. But the actual engineer is getting shit for being too accurate without his loicense.
Plunkie
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- 19 de Dic, 2017
Buddy I'm against the 2+2=5 shit but this ain't even remotely it. In the US, if you don't have the proper licensure you're not considered an engineer. You can have an engineering degree and work in an engineering position, but you're not legally considered a professional engineer until you've taken the relatively easy steps to obtain certification.
Also I hate to go "as an engineer" but lmao if you think any engineers are being accurate and not just slapping on safety factors
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- 7 de Jun, 2018
Can we get rid of Neil deGrasse Tyson too while we're at it? Guy's not an astrophysicist, he's definitely not an engineer (go look up him getting it exactly 180' wrong when tweeting about that cheating bastard Tom Brady and "deflategate"). Just...the both of them.
That little rat Harold Leuchter ran his whole shakedown business for death chambers, as well as y'know other things, with people presuming he was an engineer. Turns out he wasn't.
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- 4 de Feb, 2013
But that's entirely not what he was doing, and at no point did he claim to be an engineer, he made it clear he wasn't, he was just there to point out egregious math errors. Algebra isn't illegal.
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- 16 de Dic, 2019
No good deed goes unpunished.
O.H. Krill
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This isn't the first time North Carolina officials have done this:
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- 17 de Ene, 2021
Depends on the jurisdiction for chem eng. In Canada for example any refinery or O&G work as a chem eng requires a PE license, at least if you intend on advancing past the junior/intern roles (and doubly so in this current market).
This does seem asinine in practice, but I get where the board is coming from over this. Any engineering testimony is considered expert testimony, you expect that individual will be professionally certified and legally liable for what they say. Failure to uphold this aspect effectively opens the door to any layman being able to do the same, and that could lead to some questioning why licensing boards are even needed in the first place; after all, if laymen can take the stand, why can't they also sell their knowledge? And if that happens expect things like this to happen in excess:
The issue is that this testimony falls under design work. He's perfectly fine pointing out math errors, but the moment it crosses over into actual design it's considered engineering and requires you be licensed. It's this distinction the board is taking exception towards.
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- 4 de Feb, 2013
He was testifying on bad math, not how to do it. This is like those situations that make unions look asinine like filing grievances against someone who had the gall to move a small box two feet frome one side of a shelf to another.
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- 16 de Dic, 2019
To quote from the actual article and not the blurb:
EDIT: @Basketball Jones and @Scale Smerch the dude's a construction engineer, not a chem engineer. While he may have worked for DuPont, his job was building things for them, not chemical development.
There's nothing the least bit outstanding about his circumstances.
EDIT: @Basketball Jones and @Scale Smerch the dude's a construction engineer, not a chem engineer. While he may have worked for DuPont, his job was building things for them, not chemical development.
To say this dude is more than qualified to give expert testimony on piping systems is an understatement, and he even brought a copy of the primary "How to design piping systems" book with him for this testimony. There's a reason opposing council is trying to get his arguments dismissed through legal dodge instead of countering them factually or attacking his other qualifications.
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Can't comment on the whole legality of engineer work and obtaining this PE license. But willing to bet part of it is the state licensing board only allows so many within its jurisdiction. Which is why there's apparently this issue of 80% engineers in the nation have legal work without the license. The state only allows so many, so businesses will fund a few for their top guys and everyone else can just be glorified math teachers. This situation is stupid on all sides and mostly "well akshully" technicality shit.
ShortBusDriver
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- 18 de Dic, 2019
Because the whole licensing thing is a kickback racket with a lot of money involved.
It's also not the first time this has happened and I'm surprised they're even trying this again after this ruling:
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- 22 de Ago, 2020
I'm kind of conflicted on whether the Board of Engineering should take a long walk off a short pier, or be shoved off the end of a long pier.
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- 16 de Dic, 2019
You're going to need to make sure the pier designer is properly credentialed, first.
EDIT: Yeah, these licensing things are always bit ass scams. Now yes, this is CA, so its horribly out of control, but you're not allowed to open up your own licensing/certification shop to run training programs if one is already operating in your area. There was a big kerfuffle a while back when a guy wanted to open one up for some solar panel installation guys, and all of the conveniently union-owned electrician and roofing schools sued to stop him.
Plunkie
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Uhh...no. That's not how it works at all.
Most of the time it's just not really worth the effort, especially since the PE Exam can be extremely fucking difficult depending on your field. NCEES has stats on pass/fail rates of each degree, worth checking out.
Now whether or not these PE exams are intentionally made difficult to cull the pop is another question
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- 17 de Ene, 2021
Agreed, but that's exactly why such a fit is being thrown by the board over it. Because he lacks professional status he's seen legally as giving unsupported testimony - the advice can be perfectly correct, but is considered bad as he hasn't been vetted through a licensure board. It's certainly bureaucratic nitpicking at its finest and there is an argument over whether these edge cases should be ignored, but it exists to ensure engineering design is properly regulated and with clear chains of liability.
Engineering-wise it doesn't matter, if it's design work of any kind - including review or analysis of preexisting designs - it requires a professional license to sign off on. The fit being raised here is that the guy provided testimony over piping design which falls under this banner - i.e. needs a licensed engineer. As mentioned to kcbbq above it's an edge case, but it's one boards have reason to fight over.
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- 16 de Dic, 2019
Yes, and the dude explicitly mentioned that he had never had that sort of sign-off authority as part of his testimony.
That's where things begin falling off the rails. Apparently its illegal to give expert testimony on engineering matters while admitting one is not a licensed engineer without being a fully licensed engineer. The Board is going "REEE, you're practicing engineering without a license!" when the dude is absolutely insisting he isn't one, but that the matter at hand fell under the work he did for decades as part of his professional career, and as such, feels he can be considered an expert witness. And the court agreed, obviously.
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- 3 de Mar, 2021
Though that begs the question: if he's not a licensed, practicing engineer, then what business does he have providing "expert" testimony on an engineering problem?
A lot of you seem to be conflating the board of engineering with a union or some other pyramid scam. It's absolutely not that: it's a regulatory board. I made the comparison with doctors/medical licenses earlier because it's exactly the same. It's in exactly the same way that some retired ex-doctor that is no longer licensed can't just claim to be a licensed doctor and start treating patients and making medicine prescriptions on his own authority. It doesn't matter if he is the best doctor the world's ever seen, if he's not licensed by the medical board then he's committing a crime.
Exact same thing with engineers. The difference between an 'engineer' and someone that's actually a licensed practicing engineer is that there are strict standards and regulations for the latter. As @Scale Smerch mentioned, there's a chain of liability for the PE. If the PE makes a bridge that collapses and kills everyone, then there's a documented paper trail to follow in the ensuing lawsuits and criminal proceedings. What materials had what grade? Where's the schematic and who has access to it? Were there design flaws evident in the schematic? Was the PE who signed off on the schematic current on his best practices for load-bearing and structural integrity in <insert environment conditions here>? (Yes, most engineering boards, including the NC one, require you to stay current on the state-of-the-art for your area of engineering, and will test that regularly.) Who was the mechanical work contracted out to, and were they certified? Etc, etc. The licensed PE is required by law to have verifiable answers to those questions. The 'engineer' isn't (and there's a perverse incentive for him to not make some of that information available if he's just built a shitty bridge that murdered people).
MarvinTheParanoidAndroid
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And they're being rightfully sued for it. And you'll notice that their shitty schematic and work logs were so publicly available that an unrelated retired engineer could get his hands on them.