[rcfox]

As a computer engineer, with an iron ring and a bachelor's of applied science, I feel your pain. In Canada, there seems to be some respect given to the title, although it seems to be waning. In the UK, an engineer is someone who fixes your car or appliances. In the USA, an engineer is someone who writes PHP.

[_delirium]

Outside software, I'd say "engineers" are pretty well respected in the U.S., but I don't think it actually has any strong substantive connotation. An "engineering" job can range from some sort of strong meaning of the term, to something closer to "technician", which maybe is the non-computing analog of "programmer". There are plenty of, say, aerospace engineers, especially at the lower seniority levels, whose job mainly involves "running the numbers" in a fairly straightforward way, and not a lot of independent decision-making or problem-solving.

(Some places do distinguish "engineer" and "technician", but I don't think it's a strong boundary, and where it does exist, has more to do with formal credentials and pay grades than the actual job contents.)

[TheCapn]

Where I'm from the real difference between Engineer and Technician is the amount of responsibility that is placed upon the professional's shoulders. I have lots of technician friends who complain about the work they do being the same as engineers but aren't paid in the same grade as we are.

I'm not sure whether or not I agree with them in this case but the reality that I keep seeing is the idea of "responsibility". The work that the technician does is passed through the engineer who puts his approval/stamp/whatever on it and puts it through production.

If something a technician did came through my desk and I approved it only to have it cost my client massive financial loss for a preventable reason it is MY ass that is on the line and not the technician. I could be a technician and not have that on me but that wasn't my decision and if an employer wants to retain competent engineers they need to pay them at an appropriate grade so that they're prepared to take that responsibility.

EDIT: I guess another thing is the academics that each goes through. Technicians mostly go through courses that teach reconstruction and following the spec while engineers are given a broad problem and time to solve it.

I'm not saying technicians are incapable of design, I'm just saying the schools my friends went through didn't teach it so it isn't really expected of them.

[_delirium]

Ah yes, that's an institutional difference in how engineering sign-off works. In the U.S., you do usually need engineers with P.E. certifications to sign off on a project, and in small firms it works like you describe. But in large corporations, there are typically very few people who do official sign-offs, often only the VP of Engineering or head of a project, who signs the final designs, and anything legally deposited with a government. And they usually don't do it purely on their own professional judgment, but only after consultation with the legal department.

As a result, very few engineers actually have jobs with sign-off authority/responsibility. Even if you do have a P.E. certification, unless you're very senior you'll probably never be officially signing off on anything as a regular employee. Below the top levels, almost all engineering jobs are structured as someone doing internal technical work for the corporation that gets passed upwards for eventual sign-off. That's part of what makes the engineering/technician boundary fuzzy, because nearly everyone is a technician by the classification you describe, in the sense of someone who doesn't independently sign off on engineering work (I do agree that engineering involving more design work is a common differentiator, though).

[Aloisius]

In the US, Professional Engineers are licensed through the state and are legally responsible for their work. If you engineer a bridge and it falls down because of a design problem, you are the one at fault.

Until software engineers become legally responsible for crashes/data loss/etc. of their software and can be sued out of existence or go to prison because negligence, they will not demand the same respect that other engineers do.

[splicer]

Apparently Texas, like Canada, considers software engineering a proper discipline of engineering, subject to the same regulations as other engineering disciplines: http://sce.uhcl.edu/helm/SWEBOK_IEEE/papers/10%20reprint%205...