When did everyone start calling programmers "engineers"?

In my case, the title of "software engineer" is different since I am a software developer with an engineering degree (mechanical). I think it applies nicely to what I am and what I do.

However, there is a big difference between being a computer scientist and being a software engineer and there's an interesting parallel of this in mechanical engineering too.

Originally the field of what we call "engineering" today was the province of polymaths that studied basic physics and mathematics. Indeed many of the things we study today are named after mathematicians (Bernoulli-Euler beam theory, Cauchy stress tensor, Hooke's Law, etc.). This was the attempt by scientists to model the physical world around them. Others took these mathematical tools and applied them to the design process. These individuals were only concerned with manifesting a working version of a mental vision and they cared only about applying these formulas and rules. It was these folks that were known as "engineers".

However, they quickly realized that the idealized models were failing to produce the promised results. Not everything had been taken into account. More experimentation and modeling needed to take place. Physicists, mathematicians, and engineers themselves took it upon themselves to more accurately model the physics they needed. In fact, many people that were called engineers loved the theoretical work more than the actual design work and contributed by enlarging the engineering design toolbox. They are called engineers even though what they do isn't, strictly speaking, "engineering".

This is precisely what I believe happened in computer science. There was a lot of much needed theoretical work in the beginning of computing and we called those people scientists. We have a lot of theoretical tools at our disposal, but now that software runs the world, we have a problem with building applications. "Software engineers" are the people not concerned so much with the theory of computing but with the actual application of that knowledge to build applications. Just like in engineering, they create design rules that help avoid dire consequences for any application architecture. They care about solving the problem and scaling to meet usage first, and then consider performance. Maintainability and quality are on the forefront of their minds. In my mind, these developers are true engineers.

When did everyone start calling programmers "engineers"?

• programmer: this term seems to have reached its zenith in the mid-80s and has steadily declined since then, despite the historical ascendancy of computers, technology, and the Internet to the forefront of our daily lives; even with decreasing usage in books, however, its usage trumps by a wide margin that of all other related terms
• coder: surprisingly, this term was second most-popular for decades, until about after the mid-to-late 80s, when other terms started to outpace its usage; coder is the most "slang" of all these words and its usage in books prior to the 90s is surprising; it's more surprising that it's usage hasn't increased, as subjectively it feels like 'coder' is used much more often than before, but then again, only in the past 4 years (and mostly within tech circles), which the data set doesn't cover
• hacker: starting in the mid-to-late 70s and picking up steam in the early-to-late 90s (over 20 years later), "hacker" then seems to have shot up around the turn of the century, now becoming the second contender to the word "programmer"; it should be noted that hacker's representation here may be less attributable to actual industry jargon and more to crime or fiction books involving computers, technology, and the Internet
• software engineer: this term seems to be used the least, interestingly enough; first appearing after about 1985 and steadily rising since then, it's used about as frequently as "software developer"
• software developer: a term that was introduced to books in the early 80s, steadily increasing in usage since then (roughly tracking the same usage as "software engineer")

I am a computer scientist and when someone calls me engineer I feel insulted. My brother is a software engineer and he doesn’t want to be called other thing.

My assumption is that the work engineer was used to describe those who build things. The same way as architect was used to describe those that draw things and manager to the one that wants thing done. IT also adapted others words before to be better understood (keyboard, monitor, mouse, storage, folder…).

I consider development a science because each person has a different approach to solve a problem, we experiment, algorithms are our theories and they are valid until someone comes up with something better. An engineer just builds based in mathematical models developed by someone else. What’s fun in that?

Even if the name doesn’t limit what a person can in fact do, I consider that having anything but scientist in the description makes it sounds monotonous and dull.

About the when, we can always check on Google. Google Ngram on this case. Coder was used long before computers. Computer programmer was the first job-specific term (of the ones I could remember) then came CS, SE and SD.

CS started a small fall in the late 80s, but all the others took a blow in 2000. Maybe the .com bubble crash?

Now some other terms are rising like data scientist, machine learning specialist, and some strange designations like code ninja, jedi developer or unicorn hunter. If they feel comfortable with that, the name doesn’t matter.

This seems strangely tied into several things, though largely "title aggrandizement" and "hiring manager oddity" are two key factors.

The problem is that there is/was a difference between a "programmer" and an "engineer". The basic gist of the difference is, when referring to the mechanical field, the difference between a "mechanic" and an "engineer". A programmer knows how to write code to a specification and have it meet requirements. An engineer knows how to take the broad specifications he's been handled and turn them into the focused specification handed to the programmer and also how to define the requirements for the project from the broad specification he was handed.

A programmer can become an engineer, given enough time, some half-decent reference material and a good mentor or three. A lot of the big-names in computer programming were actually "Engineers" - if you can name them or have referenced them somewhere - they are likely "Engineers". (Dijkstra, Knuth, Hopper, et. al. are all usually noted (and likely even called themselves) "Programmers" but were most definitely Engineers)