If you're producing a technological artifact and you are ensuring it has certain properties while working within certain constraints, then in my mind you're engineering and it's a question of the degree of rigor. Engineers in the "hard engineering" fields (eg mechanical engineers, civil engineers) a rule don't build the things they design, they spend a lot of time managing/working with contractors.

> If you're producing a technological artifact and you are ensuring it has certain properties while working within certain constraints, then in my mind you're engineering

This covers every level of management in tech companies.

Not really, upper levels of management are more concerned with strategic decisions, they aren't making sure certain invariants are upheld.

I’m pretty sure engineers in those professions need to know the physical/mathematical properties of their designs inside and out. The contractors are not involved in that and have limited autonomy.

I would not want to drive over a vibe-coded bridge.

There are different degrees of rigor, but the activity is in the same broad category.

The fact that simonw is so eager to drop the word "software" in software engineer and keep the word "engineer" reeks of ego.

You're not the engineer anymore, but you're still responsible for creating software. Why drop the most important word and keep the ego stroking word?

Because in order to distinguish what we are doing from vibe coding we need the word that sounds more impressive.