alt Hacker News> In mechanical engineering you can be an engineer or a mechanic, or other things
Sure. While some mechanics may sometimes find themselves having to design things to carry out their work (in which case they would be engineers during that time), generally speaking mechanics carry out the physical replacement of what engineers have already designed. They are not designing things themselves.
But there is no mechanic analog in computing. At least there isn't a human mechanic analog. One is always operating at the design level, regardless of whether the design is written in C, Rust, or natural language. All the engineering-adjacent work you find in other engineering disciplines is done by the computer in the software realm.
> I think being an engineer implies it's a profession you've trained in and you're implementing the science behind it in a practical manor in some capacity
That's what "professional engineer" implies, but we're talking about "engineer". There is no such connotations in the word engineer alone, hence the existence of the PE term.
I would say attaching things together with or from an LLM would be the analogy. Being a mechanic and being an engineer are both technical jobs which require skill, but one is design focused while the other is system focused.
I would also disagree that "professional engineer" is a meaningful distinction from engineer. I don't really think of an engineer as being something you can do casually, it's a profession.
Also re-reading my comment I should have said adjacent to mechanical engineering, generally you don't get a degree in mechanical engineering to become a mechanic.