I'm always surprised to hear this as well. The fact of the matter is software engineering is a vast field. The title is used to describe professionals with hu

I'm always surprised to hear this as well. The fact of the matter is software engineering is a vast field. The title is used to describe professionals with huge variances in competency. But they are all professionals (someone pays them) nonetheless. This is apparent at every level. If you've ever hired fresh grads, you know there are resumes for people who have been programming since 15 in the same pile as people who have never written software outside of a school assignment. At the senior level, you have people who have written the same application a hundred times with bad habits, in the same pile as people who's natural curiosity has lead them to understand how most of the hardware and software they touch works. The idea that you would never come across a 10x discrepancy between 2 points in this distribution is silly.