If there were a license in the US for it, I’d agree with you. But as is, if you are “doing” engineering, you’re an engineer.

If you are a licensed engineer of some kind, you’d state that outright.

The equivalent of stolen valor would be claiming to be a licensed software engineer; except there is no such license so it would also be fraud, misrepresentation, etc.

(I know this is different elsewhere)

> If there were a license in the US for it, I’d agree with you.

Yeah, that is basically the thing in my country. You can't call yourself an engineer without passing a test, but I can't take it because there isn't one for software engineering.

Same thing for freelancing. Freelance jobs are defined in a list, and other jobs cannot benefit from the simplified tax rules that freelancers enjoy, but that list was written before software development was a thing.

I call myself a computer programmer unless someone is asking for my official job title (software engineer)

I'm a software dev in the US and I never call myself "engineer" in that capacity. Always "programmer" or "developer".

I agree. Engineers have to clear a much higher bar. Even though my career was spent in medical diagnostic software where we had to get 510k clearance, I was still keenly aware that this was a fundamentally different activity from actual engineering.

I'm an electrical engineer that moved to software engineering and there's a lot of commonalities between what I do now and what I did previously as an electrical engineer. The bar might seem high, but that's the only way I know how to work, honestly.

On the other hand, with the modern division of labour in a lot of companies and with the rhetoric I see here in HN and in other places: a lot of developers are indeed not even close to being engineers.

I call myself engineer because I have also an engineering degree.

But yeah, the term is mostly misused