I've always just thought of "Software Engineer" as someone who takes their profession more seriously, but it is more of a self-applied label than anything else.
In real life what that should mean is that at every step of the life cycle, you know what has to be done next, or you know where to look it up.
Customer reports a bug on release 12.4.1 of the software? There's a procedure that says what you do to record it, how to decide if it's a bug; how to decide if/when it's fixed, etc.
Boss asks why the customer saw the bug if he's spending so much money on extra testers? You have output documents that show the Test Plan for that release, the results of all Test Cases that were run. You can show that the reason no test cases found the bug is that the customer was working in an area that had no real requirements, so was never properly designed, so the designs weren't reviewed and the code was just the programmer's best guess and since there was no requirement, the testers didn't think to test that area.
How do you keep it from happening again? Your process has some kind of Continuous Improvement baked in so you can capture mistakes made and fix the procedures that caused them. Lather, rinse, repeat, automate.
That's Engineering in a very small nutshell. Most shops can't be bothered, but for an increasing percentage, it makes sense.
I know in the states Software Engineer describes most developers. How many Twitter engineers are actual engineers? Exactly.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27516/whats-the-differenc...