That's 80 percent of my job as a software engineer. Sure, I'm not an "engineer", but few find the term software engineer offensive.

Your job title is engineer because you went to a university and had to be educated in fields of study with real utility, such as statistics, topology, thermodynamics, kinetics, quantum mechanics, cellular biology, category theory, etc. Talking to people being part of a job 'engineer' doesn't define talking as 'engineering'. An actress writing an email doesn't make them an engineer just because they overlap on some of the job requirements.

Structuring 'better' prompts should simply be that - writing 'better' prompts.

Ah, so anyone who got a CS degree gets to be an engineer, but the autodidacts are just coders?

Correct. Would you let someone that didn't go to medical school perform surgery on a loved one?

No, but I'd be okay with them writing software for me if they had shown an aptitude to do so. What an incredibly weird tangent to go on.

Some people would be fine with it. But enough people do care that we have separate terms for "doctor" and "medical enthusiast". It's simply your priorities and those of society at large that determine the importance of the distinction.

Doctors don't just "go to medical school". They are licensed professionals who are required to complete extensive theoretical, practical, and professional education in a system designed and governed by the state and relevant professional bodies. They take an oath, and they are personally responsible for their mistakes and the consequences of those mistakes. They are required to conform to a rigorous system of ethics, and they can lose their license and their livelihood if they do not.

All of these facts are also true of "real engineers", and it's why coders are not "real engineers", regardless of whether they have a CS degree.

Not sure how putting my point aside to enumerate some unrelated facts about doctors supports your position. I'm just explaining why we have different words for "engineer" and "coder", it's fine if the distinction isn't useful for you.

> real utility

There's a lot to unpack here, but I'm not going to bother.

> statistics, topology, thermodynamics, kinetics, quantum mechanics, cellular biology, category theory

I have a CS degree. The only two things from this list that I studied were biology and statistics. The only one I studied with any amount of rigor was statistics, and even that was pretty light. I use none of these in my career software except for some intuition-level statistics on rare occasions. In fact, I use statistics more when I play board games in my free time than I ever do at work.

Your comment doesn't reflect the reality of writing software for what I imagine is the vast majority of people who have CS degrees.

Since people writing HTML and CSS started calling themselves "software engineers", the "engineering" word lost all meaning already. You're fighting a losing battle here.

What’s wrong with considering HTML and CSS to be a part of software engineering?

software engineering probably requires at minimum, using conditional logic, using a debugger, looking at stack traces and a profiler, and working with data structures / algorithms.

only doing HTML and CSS doesnt have any of this. things are different once you add JS/TS though.

The tools aren't as relevant as the intent. Engineers are intentional. They understand the gotchas, nuances, subtleties, etc. and proactively generate outputs to match.

If nothing else engineering is mitigating balloon grabs. Programmers? Developers? They're far more reactive and without intent far more likely to do balloon grabs.

#usernamechecksout

What is a "balloon grab" in this context?

You do X - typically hastily - and unintended consequences (read: bugs) Y and/or Z pop out somewhere else.

> software engineering probably requires at minimum, using conditional logic, using a debugger, looking at stack traces and a profiler, and working with data structures / algorithms.

Forgive me, that feels like a post-hoc rationalization of a gut feeling.

I would have said engineering is a set of practices and approaches for solving problems within a framework of requirements and constraints. That's rough, but you get the idea. Software engineering is a sub-discipline of that which is related to the realm of software, just as mechanical engineering and genetic engineering and (perhaps) prompt engineering are just flavors defined by the medium. Software engineering isn't defined by the use of some particular set of tools, I don't think any flavor of engineering is.

Real engineers build bridges and not websites?

HTML and CSS without JS are barely turing complete ain't em?

The problem with the witchcraft practitioners is not that they are calling themselves engineers - it’s that they are practicing witchcraft.

Or rather… that they are peddling their ‘knowledge’ of witchcraft as having granted them the power to make an LLM perform useful work.

When what they have is a half-baked set of herbal remedies and magic words handed down (“Greg Rutkowski”) that, if they are any more effective than just placebo, it’s purely because of luck.

Just as real engineers find it extremely offensive when code writers refer to themselves as "software engineers".

What is a "real engineer?" A railroad worker?

Someone who is licensed by the government to call themselves an Engineer, and is personally financially and criminally liable for any harm caused by defects in the things they design.

Seems like a chicken-and-egg problem: which came first: the license or the profession?

The profession came first. And then licensure was added to make sure that bridges and buildings didn't fail all the time and kill people.

HNers often launder their desperate want of institutional and social clout through the fantasy that there’s some societal view of what a Real Engineer is.

Usually out of anger over how easy it is for a smart person to become a skilled software engineer without jumping through the same unnecessary and expensive institutional hoops as OP.

So, here we go again with the hurt egos.