I have seen that a lot of people that now have "software engineering" titles that are not doing "engineering of software". They're doing network/platform management or some other task that doesn't involve the actual design and architecture of software systems. ie. it's more of a payscale for HR than an actual discipline
Engineers should be able to understand design principles and be able to architect a new system from those principles. In today's world i think we are moving further away from this than closer. We spend much of our time learning trivia such as how to fiddle with a particular software platform to get it to work.
Additionally with all the various abstractions that we have built (lock-in cloud services, high level languages, proprietary platforms, etc) many people are no longer capable of discussing with you what is happening on the CPU or how data should flow through a system or the disadvantages of a distributed architecture, etc.
I think that software engineering is still in it's infancy in someways and hasn't yet matured enough to be an engineering discipline. That being said there is an egalitarian quality about being a "software engineer". We're all software engineers.
Engineers should be able to understand design principles and be able to architect a new system from those principles. In today's world i think we are moving further away from this than closer. We spend much of our time learning trivia such as how to fiddle with a particular software platform to get it to work.
Additionally with all the various abstractions that we have built (lock-in cloud services, high level languages, proprietary platforms, etc) many people are no longer capable of discussing with you what is happening on the CPU or how data should flow through a system or the disadvantages of a distributed architecture, etc.
I think that software engineering is still in it's infancy in someways and hasn't yet matured enough to be an engineering discipline. That being said there is an egalitarian quality about being a "software engineer". We're all software engineers.