I think "Software Engineering" should mean "The study of how to best develop software". That is different from "software development" which is the practice of

I think "Software Engineering" should mean "The study of how to best develop software". That is different from "software development" which is the practice of developing software. Or you could say "software development" is applied Software Engineering. When you build a house the engineering part is designing the house and designing the processes how to build it. The rest is just the building-part which is not really engineering. In software you could say there is little difference between designing software and actually writing software. But the subtle difference is that whatever makes it GENERALLY easier to develop software is "engineering". Engineering is a study of how to do things, not the actual doing of things. So I would say that someone who writes a compiler, or reusable library, is a software engineer when they are doing that. But if they are just writing code they are equivalent to a construction worker, not an engineer. You can of course be both, at different times.