[calderarrow]

As a personal anecdote: I remember being at the ESRI Developer Conference back in 2019, and one of the keynote speakers spent a good amount of time talking about whether we were software "developers" or "engineers." I'm paraphrasing a bit, but ultimately he concluded that we were engineers because we follow scientific methods, identify problems, solve them quantitatively, and create solutions within the confines of external constraints, such as the laws of physics.

During the Q & A, someone stood up and proposed that by his definition, authors were literary engineers, since they approach writing a novel in the same way that we approached writing code.

I didn't have a horse in this race, but I remember thinking about how silly it was for my company to spend hundreds of dollars to fly me out across the country so I could listen to brilliant people discuss semantics at a software conference.

[LurkerAtTheGate]

I used to joke that we couldn't call ourselves Software Engineers without professional liability/E&O insurance, until I got a contract that required I hold exactly that and I learned it just costs $100/mo or so.