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Calling carpenters wood engineers is pretty much warranted. There should be no engineering police that determines which jobs are allowed to carry the prestigious engineer title. Software engineering was also ridiculed for the longest time by “real” mechanical engineers.

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I don't see why we have to take and muddle someone else's word, "engineer" doesn't have inherently prestigious syllables, the word sounds good when someone says it at a party because the job itself is actually hard or whatever.

If software development (or even "programming"!) is the same, the same thing will happen. If not, any other words we steal will lose their shine too and engineers will start calling themselves something else to get it back.

As a former mechanical engineer I’m not sure how common that was. Computer Scientist was/is a common alternative but that’s somewhat of an artifact of CS often being associated with math departments.

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