[daveungerer]

> I found in my research that people defending the title “engineer” rarely coherently define what an engineer is, usually boiling it down to “engineers solve problems”. The arguments against the title tend to be a little more developed, as are the arguments about transcending it.

It's a pity the author didn't go into more detail about why problem-solving is not the key defining characteristic of engineers. Since the author claims this is somehow not coherent enough, I'll share my very strong view that this is exactly what separates engineers from programmers:

Engineers apply technology to solve problems. They are rarely interested in technology just for the sake of it (that's what scientists are for), but rather in what it can do for them.

Most people in our industry today are far from being engineers. Engineers don't pick their technologies based on hype (or more charitably, excitement), and then try to find problems to solve. That's how some companies ended up using machine learning for projects where simpler statistical methods would have sufficed. It's how inexperienced developers fell for MongoDB's marketing and jumped straight to using it without considering whether it's better for their use case than the alternatives. It explains how at some point a ton of companies were using blockchain for things that could have been done with centralised databases (although that one's likely more due to company executives trying to impress investors).

If you’re always focused on using the latest thing, you’ll always have a solution in search of a problem. Reach for new tools when you have or anticipate a problem that you think might reasonably be solved by such tools. Do that and you've at least inched a bit closer to being able to reasonably refer to yourself as software engineer... if that's your thing - I'm generally not a fan of the title myself, but the engineering mindset is the most important thing I look for when interviewing candidates.