The other issue is when your state has requirements for work experience under a PE. At the time, I was working in aerospace/defense, and we had almost no PEs in any discipline. I knew of two or three PEs, one of whom was a project manager and no longer doing technical work. None of them were in the software organization. Even if people could take and pass the FE exam, it would be hard to get the experience. This one is on the states, though, since they create the requirements for becoming a PE.

What makes it worse is that my undergrad degree almost exactly mapped to the SE PE exam, which was very heavily based on SWEBOK. Before I graduated and before the PE exam was a thing, I started down the path of the IEEE CS certifications, which covered much of the same topics. I stopped that when they revamped their certification pathways.