I appreciate your opinion. I know that the qualification I made is a controversial one as everyone wants to be an ‘engineer’, but I’m still confident it holds. Applying physics is not purely at the atomic level. In web development, one of the physical challenges can be bandwidth, however, while most people claim to concerned about bandwidth, in reality they don’t do anything about it. Minifying code is cool, but that’s not doing any engineering by itself. Calculating the throughput your datacenter can dish out for your 1million users as you write a function that optimizes load vs lag of streaming video, that’s engineering.

Thinking about user interaction and experience is more psychological than it is physical in most cases. Designing the user experience of a medical device or cockpit switch are both not automatically qualified for engineering: unless, you are designing the medical device to overcome spasm that someone with Parkinson’s has, or, the cockpit switch is made of a blended plastic mix to reduce the weight requirement on a plane but hold up from wear. I’m not saying one is worse, but we need to make the distinction between designers, scientists and engineers.

I understand that everyone wants to be an engineer, whether for pride or just to feel more important (hell I want the engineer title too). Unfortunately, the tech industry (with arguably one of the most conflated egos) liberally tossed around software engineering to every role to attract talent and I don’t see that changing. It’s a profession, so whatever you are being paid to do, will determine if you are an engineer.