Maybe back in the beginning, but I don't think it's an engineering discipline now. I don't think that's bad though. I always thought we tagged on the word "engineer" so that we could make more money. I'm ok with not being one. The engineers I've known are very strict in their approach which is good since I don't want my deck to fall down. Most of us are too risky with our approach. We love to try new things and patterns, not just used established ones over time. This is fine with me, and when we apply the term "engineer" to work, I get a little uneasy, because I think it implies us doing something that most of us really don't want to do. That is, absolutely prove our approach works and will work for years to come. Just my opinion though.

I’ve had jobs where my title was “software engineer”, but I never refer to myself as such outside of work. When I tell others what I do, I say I am a software developer. It may seem a pointless distinction, but to me there is a distinction.

Neither myself nor the vast majority of other “software engineers” in our field are living up to what it should mean to be an “engineer”.

The people that make bridges and buildings, those are the engineers. Software engineers, for the very very most part, are not.

It’s a bit of a misclassification. In my mind we tend to be more like architects where there are a fair amount of innovative ideas that don’t work all that well in practice. Train stations with beautiful roofs that leak and slippery marble floors, airports with smoke ventilation systems in the floor, etc.

Of course, we use that term for something else in the software world, but architecture really has two tiers, the starchitects building super fancy stuff (equivalent to what we’d call software architects) and the much more normal ones working on sundry things like townhomes and strip malls.

That being said I don’t think people want the architecture pay grades in the software fields.

It's an understandable mistake to make; culturally an engineer is defined by the building of physical objects that have extremely high reliability expectations. But "engineer" originally referred to someone who used their ingenuity to build or do things in a manner not routine or primarily physical [1]. Basically an inventor who produced. The main engineering accreditation body in the United States adds the requirement of a professional education, but it is more or less the same [2].

We're engineers.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer#Definition

2. https://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/cr...

At the same time, if you remove 'engineer' , informatics should fall under the faculty of Science, so scientists, which are even more rigorous than engineers ;)

Maybe software tinkerer?

It's a Systems Engineering job. You provide context, define interfaces to people, tests for critical failure modes affecting customer, describe system behavior, and translate to other people.

classic ... https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/