[tiahura]

gatekeeping the word "engineer" for no reason

There was value in the word Engineer connoting professionalism and accountability. Checkers and draftsmen were checkers and draftsmen, not engineers.

Then, anyone who knew the difference between a patch cable and a crossover cable became a network engineer.

[ineedasername]

And anyone running a few ETL flows is a Data Engineer.

The gatekeeper holding closed the barn door on "engineer" got trampled long ago. Near as I can tell, it happened in the 90's, around the time lots of comp sci grads started hitting the profession, at a time when lots of programmers already in the field had come over from electrical engineering.