Actually my definition of "engineer" is much the same as what the United States requires of Civil Engineers. They call themselves "P.E.'s" - Professional Engin

Actually my definition of "engineer" is much the same as what the United States requires of Civil Engineers. They call themselves "P.E.'s" - Professional Engineers. A PE is required to do Civil Engineering as a result of an incompetently-designed gas pipe rupturing, and killing three hundred people. In the entire nation of Canada, one cannot publicly denote oneself as an "engineer" of any sort, unless one is the Canadian equivalent of a PE. In my own case, it was flatly illegal that I did so, as I did not have a professional software engineering license, had not served an apprenticeship, and had a physics rather than a software engineering degree, however I was completely prepared to defend myself in court, as I regard myself as a far, far more competent engineer than the vast majority of "engineers" that I have ever personally met. (Note that a "software engineering" degree is quite a different thing than a "computer science" degree.) I'm completely cool with just about anyone calling themselves a "Computer Programmer", but I'm not cool with just anyone calling themselves a "Software Engineer". Consider that I'm damn near clueless about computer science. What I can do is write code that is completely flawless, runs fast and uses very little memory. I can also take a total rat's nest that someone else wrote, and get all the bugs out of it. > During the dotcom bubble anyone that could click a button was hired. But it was a bubble. I got my first private-industry coding job in 1986.