When was the last time a person with the title engineer was an actual engineer? Even software engineers are usually just programmers, sometimes senior sometimes not. Hence my question.

I think you can usually tell what someone is not by looking at their job title. The last word tells you what they're not (except for those management positions where they do it backwards and say "vice president communications" - in those cases any parsable subcomponent of the name tells you what they are not; a vp comms can neither communicate nor are they a vp).

Yeah generally not directly anymore. Many come from a software engineer background though and find the sales side of things interesting. The money can be better than a Dev at a company that is doing well too.

Some places call them Solution Architects too which IMO is a better name as they work with customers to help them see how their company solutions can be integrated and made useful.

the ones that i know are former engineers. they also have excellent verbal skills and seem to be the smartest people in the room. may or may not be the best coders — i don’t know — but they are very impressive in person.