Call it what you will, there are ranges of skills needed in technical activity, and those of the engineer are not the same as those of the technician, though it is much more of a continuum than any two words suggest. In many branches of technology, there are certain tasks that need an understanding of calculus, but it is not so clear that there is an equivalent in software development, and I certainly do not think that programming in Lisp as opposed to C (or any other language choice) counts as such.