If you look at the definition of an engineer: An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathemat

If you look at the definition of an engineer: An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics, economics and ingenuity to develop solutions to meet economic and societal needs. -- wikipedia I think programmers easily fall under that category. Think about the issue programmers runs into when developing say a web app. You have scaling issues, database issues, system problems, and general limitations of the programming language you are using...solving all these problems often follows the same approach an engineer works through.