If you look at any other field containing "engineers", the mathematical basics are not abstracted away over time. Mechanical engineers have taken courses in mat

If you look at any other field containing "engineers", the mathematical basics are not abstracted away over time. Mechanical engineers have taken courses in math and physics; that part never goes away. Technicians are the guys who may have impressive technical knowledge and skills but never learned the theory behind it. From the perspective of the old-fashioned engineers, if a programmer calls himself a "Software Engineer" instead of a "Computer Programmer", he'd better have some fundamentals to back it up. (Of course not all programmers need to be engineers -- technicians are great. But somebody in the building needs to known why things work they way they do.)