[constantcrying]

>You could, but it would be rather silly as machinist is clearly a subset of engineer

That is ridiculous. Engineering is distinguished by being an academic career.

Obviously there is value in distinguishing academics and tradesmen.

[randomdata]

> Engineering is distinguished by being an academic career.

I expect you mean that Professional Engineer (PE) is distinguished as being a member of a certain professional organization (or groups of organizations). Indeed, that is true. Has little to do with the topic at hand, though.

I'm not familiar with any differentiation by academic career, unless you are thinking of "Professor of Engineering", or something along those lines? But "professor" seems to be the operative word there.

What about the definition of engineer even suggests academics? It is, in my mind, decidedly pointed to practitioners. It literally states "design, build, or maintain". Those are decidedly not academic pursuits.

[constantcrying]

Where I live you can not call yourself an "engineer" at all without a specific university degree.

It is pointless to discuss here, if you do not see the value in distinguishing the career of learning a trade and a getting a degree, I won't convince you otherwise. Obviously the rest of the world doesn't consider a bricklayer an engineer, just because he is building something and wouldn't want to conflate the civil engineer responsible for that building with the profession of brick laying.

[randomdata]

> Where I live you can not call yourself an "engineer" at all without a specific university degree.

Same here, but we're still going to call other people engineers because usurping a term already found in the common lexicon and trying to hold it legally hostage is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. The existence of a law does not imply sound reasoning.

> if you do not see the value in distinguishing the career of learning a trade and a getting a degree, I won't convince you otherwise.

If there was such benefit, professional engineering organizations would serve no purpose. In reality, it's the professional organization that brings benefit. After all, you can't take someone's degree away. But you can remove them from being a professional member when they don't abide by the "engineering code", which is where the actual benefit lies.

But if you want to call attention to the degree you hold for whatever arbitrary reason, why not simply say "I have a degree"? Why would "engineer" need to say the same thing? In reality nobody is going to care anyway (they might care if you are a member of a PE organization, though), but if they did for some bizarre reason, they're going to want to see proof, so your word doesn't matter anyway. There is good reason the prevailing definition of engineer does not imply anything of the sort.

[constantcrying]

I think I am not going to convince you that distinguishing a brick layer and a civil engineer is meaningful and helpful.

[randomdata]

We do distinguish them. You literally just demonstrated it! "Brick layer" draws a clear distinction from the "architect" who designed the building, as well as the "janitor" who maintains the building afterwards. Throw those terms out to a random person on the street and they're bound to have a pretty good idea what you mean in that differentiation. The differentiation is helpful! That is why we have created words to call attention to the differentiation found in different engineering roles, just like we do for physicians, and every other broad career category out there.

But, as least as far as I know (and nobody seems to have anything to suggest otherwise), we've never done the same within different software engineering specialities. The only thing that I've ever seen that might come close is "software architect", but despite working in the industry I honestly have no idea what that actually means. The people who claim that title don't seem to do anything different than anyone else. Without a "software brick layer", what could it even begin to mean? Whatever it means, I'm certain the average person on the street will have no clue as to what a "software architect" is and how it differs from anyone else working on software.

As such, what I suggested is that within the software discipline we've never reached generally accepted terms to spell out that differentiation because it doesn't matter in software. We get a few people here and there with bizarre emotional attachments to different jobs that wish there was differentiation (what I suspect is the source of "software architect"), but that does not make for a practical reason to actually put in the effort on a population scale.

Sure, perhaps it will start to matter as the field evolves. Software is still quite young in the grand scheme of things. The differentiation between brick layer and architect in the early days of building construction was no doubt equally useless; only becoming useful as the profession grew up. And, indeed, when that time comes we'll have little choice but to start to settle on words to describe different software development jobs, but until then...