I agree with most of what you say, but there has to be more to the definition of engineering than "important stuff smart people do". The best working definitio

I agree with most of what you say, but there has to be more to the definition of engineering than "important stuff smart people do". The best working definition I have comes by way of several of my college professors: An engineering problem is one in which you are given a set of requirements and asked to minimize cost; anyone who solves such problems is an engineer. Most subdisciplines of engineering have developed their own language and standards for how to specify the requirements, develop potential solutions, and analyze the cost of those solutions. In young subdisciplines, like software engineering, these can appear more like folk wisdom than rigorous processes sometimes; that doesn't mean they're not engineering, just that we still have a lot to discover about them.