I think it&#x27;s an ok essay, certainly better than &quot;click bait&quot;.<p>I urge programmers not to call themselves engineers, but it&#x27;s not really because I&#x27;m worried about a misappropriation of a title.  We already have sound engineers and special effects engineers and financial engineers, and I don&#x27;t think anyone is confused about the difference between a structural engineer and a software engineer, so this controversy seems a little bit contrived.  Also, while reading half a book on PHP and MySql and calling yourself an &quot;engineer&quot; is a bit of an eye roller, I don&#x27;t think that calling people who design large scalable systems that need to provide highly accurate and timely results in high stakes systems an &quot;engineer&quot; is that bad an appropriation of the term &quot;engineer&quot;.  Keep in mind, this term had meaning long before the PE bodies showed up.  According to the wikipedia page, &quot;engineer&quot; is devised from the latin words for &quot;to contrive, devise&quot; and &quot;cleverness&quot;, so in many ways, you could say a clever bit of programming is closer to the spirit of &quot;engineering&quot; than conservatively applying tried and true formulas to make sure a bridge or building doesn&#x27;t fall down.<p>I avoid the term &quot;software engineer&quot; because I don&#x27;t want organizations like the &quot;National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying&quot; to start thinking they have a right to regulate who gets to write software.    I also think programmer is a great word. I feel like there&#x27;s a kind of insecurity in calling ourselves something other than programmers.  Yes, programmers do more than just write code, we consult, understand business requirements, start businesses, interact with users, take early adopters through betas, refine, adapt, prototype, teach, write technical articles.  I just don&#x27;t see why we need to keep adding a new word.<p>I don&#x27;t really mind &quot;Developer&quot; either, but I&#x27;d say let&#x27;s stop the word churn and instead make our title something to be proud of, rather than trying to appropriate another word.  When people ask me what I do, I just tell them I&#x27;m a programmer.<p>In spite of all this, I&#x27;m not really against some kind of exam, but I really don&#x27;t like the idea that it will be locked down to people who have paid $45,000 a year for three possibly unnecessary years of graduate school, under pain of imprisonment, like law.  It&#x27;s really awesome that people who studied math, or physics, or philosophy, or didn&#x27;t go to college at all can contribute at the very highest level, and in fact many of the most brilliant contributions have come from people who didn&#x27;t study CS.  Many brilliant contributions come from people who did study CS.  But we really don&#x27;t want to lock down Software &quot;Engineering&quot; this way, and scope creep is a serious danger.  In short, I could see it being a good thing, but I could also see it going wrong in a very harmful way.