I disagree. When I code for my own amusement I might see myself as an artist but when I do professional work I definitely want to see myself as an engineer as w

I disagree. When I code for my own amusement I might see myself as an artist but when I do professional work I definitely want to see myself as an engineer as well as a craftsman. To me it feels as if we are just at a very early stage. It takes huge amounts of time to learn software engineering, putting aside mastering it and humans haven't been practicing for very long. So I'd guess that we're just clueless enough to not be able to feel like engineers yet. We learn most of our practical abilities from experience so thats an argument for craft, but once we get a better understanding of what we are actually doing, and formalize it, our job will probably be very engineery. There is just millions of problem domains and no formal education on the domain of writing software yet (no a CS degree is not it). And I think there is a class of applications that are already so well understood that they do get developed in an engineering fashion already.