I had the privilege of sharing office space with the engineers at a former employer, with at one point sitting next to a chemical engineer on my left and a mech

I had the privilege of sharing office space with the engineers at a former employer, with at one point sitting next to a chemical engineer on my left and a mechanical engineer on my right. The former spent all day analyzing formulations and generating test data, and the latter spent all day putting together various parts and gizmos in SolidWorks. To me the biggest difference between us (besides the work itself) was process -- this half of the engineering department was full of it. And it was respected. There were notebooks describing process for every little thing, and so much of the work produced had to be signed off on. We sometimes worked together closely, as we were building machines that were driven by software, and I felt respected by them and they seemed comfortable with us being titled Software Engineers. We seemed to share a similar mindset and curiosity about the world and discussions tended towards the scientific. Though, I would note that that software org spent a lot of time writing things in-house; our department had almost zero integration with outside vendors save those that were performing some other service for us. I am not sure that this modern flavor of "software engineering," where it seems more time is spenting thinking about how to glue together various services, resembles what we did there.