Had the same reaction to Carmack's wording.

I don't agree about the distinction between programming and engineering; to me it's all programming, engineering is just the word we started using to make it sound higher status.

Fair enough. I can see your point about engineering, but in this case I find it hard to classify the generic SaaS programmer and the guy calculating Pi to 2700 billion digits on his workstation using his own formula - which actually is the innovation here - under the same rubric, but I guess that boat has sailed a long time ago.