[sjg007]

That's a weird definition of engineering. I think you are confusing implementation (construction technique) which is of course valuable, with the more general principle of designing in safety margins, redundancies, and tolerances for specific loads/forces. This is a lot of applied math.

[btown]

But there's a difference between "I have learned how to use applied mathematics to design a specific physical deliverable while ensuring safety margins and tolerances" and "I am contributing to the state of the art in the general theorems used by my entire industry." Some civil, chemical, mechanical etc. engineers do both! But most engineers spend most of their time on the former.

And what is software engineering but exactly that dynamic? Relational algebra and distributed systems design are most certainly based on applied mathematics, and one uses tooling built around the underlying theorems to ensure that parts mesh together in a reliable way that scales under load. Some engineers take their learnings from specific projects and write papers, and that's amazing, but that doesn't mean that if you don't have an Arxiv account you're not an engineer.

We're not just fire-and-forget script writers; we're engineers and we draw on decades of an industry's worth of deep knowledge to ensure our systems are rock-solid. I hope everyone who considers themselves "just a software developer" finds a team that appreciates this.

[tommiegannert]

Those safety margin and tolerance calculations are based on existing models (what I called "tables"), combined to form a new whole. What I would call composition.

Whether math is being applied doesn't seem like an important distinction to whether something is composition or not. I reason about computational complexity when I build distributed systems, just like civil engineers reason about tolerances. But I'm still assuming a best-of-class sorting algorithm and a reduction of some domain problem into a shortest-path algorithm. The same they do about I-beams and spans.