@Engineer80 Not exactly. It’s true that California professional licensing boards have a reputation for unusual flexibility when it comes to educational requirements – but they have also a reputation for unusual rigor when it comes to examination requirements.
For example, any lawyer will tell you that California Bar Exam is one of the most difficult in the country – many would call it the hardest. California also has tougher Civil PE exam requirements than other states (in practice, most PEs are civils). California uses the same FE and Civil PE exams as other states – but California also requires civils to pass a state-specific exam on surveying, plus a particularly difficult state-specific exam on seismic design. PEs from other states routinely complain about the difficulty of getting licensed in CA; you can’t get reciprocity for civil practice unless you pass the civil PE exam specifically, plus you have to pass the CA-specific surveying and seismic exams.
Furthermore, if you want a CA geotechnical license, that’s another 8-hour exam on top of the civil PE license. If you want a structural license, then that’s a 16-hour exam on top of the civil PE license. A California structural engineering license requires 37 hours of examinations total, and is probably the single hardest professional engineering license to obtain in the US. Yes, you could theoretically qualify for it with a non-ABET degree, but this is uncommon in practice.