I'm in NA and also don't understand why coder is negative. I remember it was very common in the old demoscene days. I've never even seen someone non-technical use the term. Usually non-technical people use programmer.

The one that irks me is engineer. I've met very few developers who have the sort of professionalism that the term engineer requires. Most developers are more like cowboys whose primary goals are making other developers and themselves happy. An engineer needs to instead feel responsible for serving the users of the application, which includes maintenance by others as a subgoal. No doubt my definition of engineering is not popular here.

I haven't seen it as a pejorative either, yet I would not refer to myself as a coder.

A good software engineer/developer has more than just code on their mind when getting something done. In fact, code is ideally the last thing you get around to.