So? Does it make it simple somehow?

Lemmygrad is an anti-programmer space now lol

Not really sure if I would agree with this statement. At least in my experience, a software engineer is someone who designs how systems should operate, as opposed to software developers that actually program the software. In my part of the world, titles like software engineer and software architects are basically used interchangeably. It is not really trying to be an engineer, but rather description that it is someone who designs something or engineer solution to something.

These are good points, but I think they’re one-sided.

There clearly is a prestige factor in the label, ‘engineer’. But I would argue that being a member of the labour aristocracy is defined by ones relation to the means of production, not one’s job title. A software developer earning six figures is in the labour aristocracy whatever their title. An engineer on anything up to 60k will be proletariat or labour aristocracy depending on other social factors and their country of residence regardless of whether they’re called an engineer.

I would also strongly challenge the idea that ‘real engineers’, by which you seem to mean civil or structural engineers, are cognisant of the consequences of their failures, and that software developers are not.

Part of my objection would be to the implied meaning of ‘failure’. For example, an engineer could be involved in a new bridge that encourages car use and discourages mass transportation. I would say that’s a failure of the highest order, even if nobody drives off the bridge because the engineer remembered the safety barriers.

A second part of my objection would be to the idea that engineers do act to avoid health and safety failures of the type that you seem to be referring to. Engineers would have been involved in the decisions relating to adding inflammable cladding on Grenfell Tower, maintaining the train tracks in Ohio, indeed every other industrial disaster (asbestos, Bhopal, Rana Plaza, Champasak, etc), building on land that is essential to biodiversity, building hostile cities that preclude public gatherings, building oil pipelines, working out how small developers can build rooms and how little soundproofing they get away with, building multi-lane super highways, Boeing airplanes that fall mysteriously out the sky, plumbing systems that must be replaced every so many years, producing ‘effective’ nuclear weapons, etc. These are just a few examples.

The point is that engineers are culpable in all the harms of capitalism to the extent that they accept the logic of capitalism and/or do nothing to challenge that logic in their work. To put these types of engineers above software developers on the basis of stricter regulation seems to distort the reality and accept bourgeois reasoning.

A third part of my objection would be in the association between ‘engineer’ and ‘health and safety’ in the negative sense to suggest that software developers are not engineers because they are not concerned with health and safety. If the people who design the software inside cars, planes, elevators, medical equipment, ovens, microwaves, etc, fuck up, then they are going to prison. And they’ll struggle to get another job in the same area afterwards.

There’s maybe an argument that someone who e.g. makes game apps is not an engineer, but I’d have to be persuaded. Any argument in that vein would have to make similar distinctions between ‘real engineers’ and those ‘real engineers’ who work on, let’s say, ‘frivolous’ projects like sound engineers in the film or music industry. It seems problematic to define a category of work based on what some people will apply their knowledge to.

There is also an industry of people who call themselves story engineers, although they are referring to a specific role in the writing process. This suggests some common agreement that engineer can be acceptably applied even outside the category ‘real engineers’. And although I doubt anyone seriously calls themselves a painting engineer who ‘merely’ applies paint, the people who work with the pigments, anticoagulation elements, VOC release, etc, probably could call themselves paint engineers.

I think I’m arguing that the definition of engineer cannot be determined by the difference between the tangible and the intangible (which seems to be implied in your comment).

they’re linguists but instead of translating and interpreting things and discovering cool history in language, they build apps to destroy entire job sectors and tell self-driving cars to only avoid white ppl

In my opinion, this stems from their feelings of class inferiority and a belief that since they make similar levels of income to engineers and make complex “things” that they are deserving of the title.

Silent watchmaker anguish noises

No regrets

This one is actually debunked oficially, but still shows up a lot in the internet.

And it wasn’t entirely baseless btw, though that bone crap was obvious nonsense. In ancient times both in Europe, Asia and Africa, common practice was to offer a human sacrifice before something very important. Building important buildings counted in that, the sactifices bodies were often interred in the foundations so that their spirits guard the building or something like that.

In China of Spring and Autumn, Warring States and Qin era it was slowly disappearing (roughly at the same time as in Mediterranean basin) but still happened occasionally. We don’t know if that did happened to either earlier fragments or to the Qin Great Wall, but it would be prime candidate.

No engineers in the Western hemisphere either own the means of production or actually build anything, they just get paid to draw stuff and then they supervise construction.