I'm a software dev in the US and I never call myself "engineer" in that capacity. Always "programmer" or "developer".

I agree. Engineers have to clear a much higher bar. Even though my career was spent in medical diagnostic software where we had to get 510k clearance, I was still keenly aware that this was a fundamentally different activity from actual engineering.

I'm an electrical engineer that moved to software engineering and there's a lot of commonalities between what I do now and what I did previously as an electrical engineer. The bar might seem high, but that's the only way I know how to work, honestly.

On the other hand, with the modern division of labour in a lot of companies and with the rhetoric I see here in HN and in other places: a lot of developers are indeed not even close to being engineers.