What’s a “real engineer”? Railroad Engineer? Civil Engineer? Aerospace Engineer?

Don't be cute. Professional Engineer / Chartered Engineer is a "real" engineer. A random coder calling themselves an "engineer" doesn't make them qualified to design and implement life-critical safety systems.

Some countries have that norm, but in the United States, PE licensing is fairly unusual, due to rules allowing corporations to have one PE sign off on the work of a lot of engineers. As a result, even in the case of critical medical equipment, most of the real engineers who scoped, designed, and tested the product are not PEs.

Often the PE is more of a lawyer than an engineer. They typically do have an engineering degree, but are years out from any hands-on engineering work. They do final legal sign-off, and are knowledgeable about statutes and insurance policies, but rely on people with more recent technical experience to do any technical work.

Sure, I could imagine that is the case in fields like nuclear engineering. All the PEs I know are smart and have technical chops. Though, most of my PE friends are fairly young (early 30s) and are maybe on their way to that destination.

"Some countries have that norm, but in the United States, PE licensing is fairly unusual, due to rules allowing corporations to have one PE sign off on the work of a lot of engineers."

Which is significantly stronger than the state of software engineering.

There is such a thing as Software Engineers, but most developers are not that.

In this case, I think it means someone with the perspective to think things through at a systems level and relevant domain expertise.

So, a medical device engineer.

Probably someone with a PE license.

Someone that has at least passed the fundamentals of engineering exam, preferably with a PE. Then we could guarantee a minimum understanding of the relevant fields.

Engineer who pAssed the FE exam here. 9 years design experience. I can do math.. what's needed?

I agree programmers are not on this level.

Why 'level'? Its a different body of knowledge.

Tons of programmers are on that level - in fact, probably more developers at 'Engineering caliber' than any other Eng. discipline.

That said - the vast majority of developers are nowhere near that.

It's a really long tail.

I assume Boeing engineers are enough