In my experience, 'engineer' has closer connotations to janitor than 'programmer'. Certainly in the UK, engineering as a profession has a big image problem beca

In my experience, 'engineer' has closer connotations to janitor than 'programmer'. Certainly in the UK, engineering as a profession has a big image problem because the average person doesn't distinguish between e.g. a heating engineer (who fixes the boiler) and say, a civil engineer (someone with a Masters degree + 4 years professional experience and accreditation). People I know who are programmers all have professional jobs and by and large are earning more than those I know who are engineers. That's probably not a representative sample of 'programmers' though. tl;dr: 'engineer' doesn't sound too professional either, at least in the UK. IMO Software Developer sounds better than either, and that's what I tell people I am.