I'm not sure what you mean by this - I don't think any competent person would agree a Software Engineer's job is "closely related" to a Mechanical Engineering degree, but I've seen a few examples of people successfully being granted a TN for a Software Engineering job with a Mechanical Engineering degree (including you).
Getting a TN visa for Software Engineering with a Mechanical Engineering degree?
- Thread starter jarmve
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idk why he insists on the notion that you must have an 'engineering degree' to qualify for an engineering tn visa, the majority of Canadian software engineers in the US hold CS degrees rather than some sort of engineering degree because CS is the standard and most relevant degree to software engineering, this is really indisputable.
His comments insinuates that 'non-engineering' degree holders are abusing the tn engineer category for software engineering jobs is rather distasteful. CS majors are by far the most qualified degree holders for a job, a ME degree holder is no more qualified for a software engineering job than a economics major, it's just completely disjoint and irrelevant training. There are many jobs which abuses the Engineering title because the jobs themselves have nothing to do with engineering and cheapens the field, that has no relevance with with proper engineering jobs which employs someone who's formal education is not from an engineering school. In many specialized engineering fields like signal processing/analysis, quantum optics, fluid dynamics, an engineering degree is in fact a poor fit for the role and an applied mathematician or applied physicist is much more suitable.
nelsona
Registered Users (C)
My job was an ME job. The title was software engineer. The job description made it clear that I would be working as an engineer. The posted pre-requisite of the job (remember?, the sponsor does the hiring) was an engineering degree.
The problem is that there is no software category other than CSA; outdated regs of course.
I do not say that TNers are abusing the Engineering category, I'm saying that the term software engineer is misappropriated by non-engineers. Non-engineer TNers are simply getting CSA TNs, because there is a realization that SE doesn't fit with traditional engineering. You can be sure that when a TN letter is written for an SE job, it does not request the TN in Engineering (for risk of denial) unless the job is truly engineering and the candidate has an engineering degree; it simply asks for TN: the officer looks at the job, the "related" degree, concludes the job and the candidate are CSA and grants TN.
The problem is that there is no software category other than CSA; outdated regs of course.
I do not say that TNers are abusing the Engineering category, I'm saying that the term software engineer is misappropriated by non-engineers. Non-engineer TNers are simply getting CSA TNs, because there is a realization that SE doesn't fit with traditional engineering. You can be sure that when a TN letter is written for an SE job, it does not request the TN in Engineering (for risk of denial) unless the job is truly engineering and the candidate has an engineering degree; it simply asks for TN: the officer looks at the job, the "related" degree, concludes the job and the candidate are CSA and grants TN.
It's true that software engineering is often misappropriated. but what is the cutoff where software engineering is an engineering job and when it's abusing the title? For example, someone who works in distributed systems and infrastructure at amazon/google/facebook etc. this is not an IT position, it involved rigorous analysis of many classes of processing, storage and network components to come up with a proper solution, it must be structure so that it can be build and maintained with minimal or no downtime. Do you consider this to be 'engineering'? the standard academic qualifications for this type of work is minimum BS in CS, often advanced work is looking for someone with a PhD. What about computer vision for autonomous vehicles? Or Mobile where difficulty can range from uber scale all the way down to local pizza chain scale. How do you assess whether or not it is engineering?
Is it safe to say that for my case, if a big company is to extend me an offer, then they would tailor the job description + ask for the TN to be in engineering to game this? It all seems very semantic to me
they will likely tailor it based on whatever they believe is most likely to get you approval. at the end of the day, law is about semantics and interpretations, it's rarely black and white. Otherwise there would be no lawyers.
This perception might have been much more true 10-20 years ago, especially when "programmer" was still a job description.
The OOH CSA lists "Most analysts do some programming in the course of their work.". But it's not the primary duty. It's ancilliary to "study an organization’s current computer systems and procedures and design improvements to them".
These days I have seen enough SDEs get approved, and never seen any rejected, so it makes me wonder if the CBP has realized that most IT positions can have their job duties credibly descibed in a way which closely matches the OOH, and so given up on treating "programmer" as a job they have to look for & exclude.