I've had to go on HN a bunch to say this. Engineering school is brutal and generally requires passing a great deal of difficult courses that signal to certain e

I've had to go on HN a bunch to say this. Engineering school is brutal and generally requires passing a great deal of difficult courses that signal to certain employers that you'd be a good fit to design the power grid or components of space shuttles. They also give you a certain framework/toolbox to work with after you've done calculus, differential equations, circuits, dynamics, statics (not statistics), material balances, coding + all the upper level classes. This is different than the framework/toolbox that an economist would get to help recommend policy changes. Economists don't call themselves engineers and engineers don't call themselves economists. I'd actually argue that the mathematical models and econometrics used by economists is closer to engineering than just programming. A programmer/developer also has a very challenging job that involves what is essentially solving a complex technical puzzle under a huge variety of social constraints such as working within a team and meeting project deadlines and making trade-offs (for example, monolith or microservice). It isn't what engineers define as engineering though.