>Outside of software, an engineer is a professional - a member of a professional body, licensed to undertake specified design and construction work, and require

>Outside of software, an engineer is a professional - a member of a professional body, licensed to undertake specified design and construction work, and required to take regular training and re-licensing Software engineering got its roots from electrical engineering and this isn't true for most electrical engineers. You only need to be licensed in a few subsets of electrical engineering (i.e. power production and distribution). All other areas don't require a license. There is a difference between software engineers and programmers. I had it explained to me like this. If you spend more than 50% of your time programming, you can't call yourself a software engineer. A software engineer is supposed to spend most of their time designing and architecting a solution, testing assumptions, documenting the design process and conducting design reviews. This process is slow and tedious but if done correctly will save you a lot of headaches in the future.