It's not a disservice or an injustice, but it does paint a very incomplete picture. Like talking about Harvard lawyer and law professor Barack Obama.

Hardwon profession: Three weeks in a boot camp followed by two years on the bloody frontlines of the Framework Wars...

To be fair, when you become a doctor it is because your peers grant you the title, not merely due to your GPA.

Outside the US, engineering is the same. Within the US, there is no formal board for software engineerig but we can at least informally say one is an engineer if other engineers would recognize them as such. I know people whom graduated bootcamps and could qualify as engineers, albiet inexperienced ones, and those who have finished 4 years of schooling but cannot practice engineering.

The guy in the article was inducted into the Academy of Science and Engineering at 34. Whether that makes him pretigious or not isn't the question, but there is no doubt in my mind that he is an engineer.

This. It's "engineers" themselves who have degraded the term (once a profession nearly as stringently accredited as doctors or lawyers) by applying it to anyone who can copy/paste stack overflow answers into a text editor.

It's not the engineers doing that.

A software developer is an engineer the same way a janitor is a sanitation engineer.

I have friends in IT who get really angry when I refer to them as computer-janitors.

I support our troops.

In certain Eastern countries, Engineer (capitalized) is a title much like Attorney or Doctor.