Sorry about the confusion. We call our developers engineers.

I'm told in Canada it's not allowed to have 'Engineer' in your title if you lack a P.Eng.; I think I prefer this situation to the common practice here in the States.

Can I ask why you prefer this? I think that prefacing the word engineer with the type of engineering is much more preferable than redefining the word to mean something to do with physical engineering.

I think it's not so much about the 'physical' part as about the 'rigorous training, certification and qa assurance practices' part. Developing software is very different from constructing a building (I do both, not as an engineer though); software is new, almost each and every time, because once it's build, you can just copy it byte by byte. Developing software is about pushing the edge in an unconstrained space. Physical construction (buildings, bridges, roads) is about repeatability; rigorous standards to reach a quantifiable production standard, and a build-in inertia to change. Large outfits (IBM, IT dev depts of big-four, that sort of thing) want to get software development to those levels, but nobody has managed so far.

It's a similar situation with the word Architect.

Everyone in tech fancies themselves an engineer and architect these days, although they have little nothing to do with the original intent for those long established professions.

It can be confusing and misleading for non-tech people.