Licensed engineers are technically held accountable by their peers. The definition of a profession (versus just a job) is that professionals as a group are self-regulating. That is why e.g. doctors can be disciplined by their College, and lawyers can be disbarred by the legal society.

This is because Professional Engineering is actually a social process, not really a technical one. The work is technical, sure, but the reason we have Professional Engineers is because society realized long ago that letting any idiot build e.g. a bridge for public traffic is a bad idea.

Society, via legislation, grants professional licensing bodies special privileges in return for exerting control over the practising members of that profession.

The reason you don't see as many EEs (or aerospace) engineers with PEs is because the products that get produced in those specialties get certified in different ways. There's no bridge equivalent to the FCC, for example.

Pretty big assumption.

From my perspective what I always loved about "the profession" was a relative LACK of gatekeeping. I loved offensive security for the same reason, there was a long run where you really just needed to be able to hack, and if you could demonstrate that there was a job for you somewhere (for better or worse).

Keeping the industry in its current form frozen in amber would be as weird as, I don't know, keeping horses & carriages in business by regulating scarcity of motor vehicle licenses. Not a great analogy but hopefully you see what I mean.

Doctors protect doctor's interests. Lawyers aren't idiots, they're professionals who run businesses with the express intent to make money.

Software engineers seem to be just bright enough to make money, and just stupid enough to say, no no, please I'd prefer to be homeless, please take my job and automate me, offshore me, and devalue my salary out of existence all at once.

It would fix it for me, automatically, if I was willing to let it run amok in my codebase. But asking if the "vuln" was exploitable triggered the guardrails and a "we can't show you this content" error because I am not part of the cybersecurty Trusted Access bullshit.