[detaro]

My impression (which kind of matches the blog series) is that that "like an engineer" bit is a bit overhyped in these discussions. E.g. a good chunk of what I do is embedded software, so I sometimes work with EEs that have designed the hardware my software is supposed to run on - and the range of how systematically (or not) they approach things isn't any smaller than the one you find in software. (Now I wonder if they also have discussions of "if you are just combining parts on a board and not designing your own ICs, are you really an engineer?", but given what I've seen I doubt it - they seem to care mostly about who has the formal right to claim the title)

[kragen]

Yeah, that's my experience too. And I can report, from working with EEs and talking to EE family members, that they do sometimes engage in that sort of my-subdiscipline-is-realer-than-yours one-upmanship too, but more often it's about using "outdated" design practices vs. "immature" ones, or about the appropriate balance of planning vs. exploration for a given project. All very familiar territory for programmers, though there are some differences.