I dunno, it's just a title game. I would guess it's because programmers in the 90s simultaneously had massive hubris and insecurity issues and wanted to be just

I dunno, it's just a title game. I would guess it's because programmers in the 90s simultaneously had massive hubris and insecurity issues and wanted to be just as respected in the community as actual engineers, but who knows. Engineer invokes a sense of design, but so does programmer. When I started, there was no job where you just coded straight pseudocode specs. Business described the problem the way business does, and you had to convert that into a computer solution. Within that solution, different developers would own various parts of it. I would say the entire process of having coders who design systems and coders that just write code is inherently broken. Businesses want to think of development as prod-ops, but it's more like book publishing. I'm of the mind that if a coder who designs a system in enough detail to write pseudocode, he should just write the application. The better approach is have an architect/lead model subsystems and a general skeleton of the application, then have different teams implement the subsystems. Clearly defined interfaces on all inter-subsystem communications.