Saying they are the same thing is definately one way of looking at it.

However, just because someone knows how to slap together a few statements in some programming language doesn't tell me much about their skill level because pretty much everyone can write "hello world". So saying that both titles refer to someone who programs really doesn't tell you much.

The way I've come to look at it is that pretty much anyone can be a programmer and do a passable job at simple tasks. At the low-end programming isn't that hard. However, there's going to be a point where their skill set isn't up to the task at hand. That is when you need a software engineer. The difference in the title, when properly applied, is that it tells you something about the relative skill set of the individual. Of course, there's no objective standard by which such skill sets are assessed, so its up to each person to tell you who they are by the title they pick. Which brings us back to anyone claiming they are a software engineer.

I suspect what happens in most cases is that companies apply interview sieves to separate out the programmers from the software engineers among the applicants, regardless of what title they claimed on their resume. One approach I heard of recently was to pair program with the applicant to get a better idea of where they stand. I haven't tried this, but its the first interview "technique" I've heard of that stands some reasonable chance of accurately assessing someone's ability since you're seeing it live.

Unfortunately academic degrees are not a useful proxy indicator for a software engineer, since I've met plenty of people with the degree but not much of a clue in software engineering.

Another example that came to me later after writing this post: what's the difference between a handyman and a civil engineer? Both can build you a little shed in your back yard. But do the handyman's skills really scale up to a 50 story office building? Probably not. In those circumstances you really want the civil engineer (and architect, etc.) to make your 50 story office building. Fundamentally they are both doing the same thing -- building stuff. However, the engineer has the breadth and depth of knowledge that gives you confidence that his 50 story office building won't collapse under its own weight.

That's similar to the distinction I draw for programmer vs. software engineer. The latter has the breadth and depth of skills that make it feasible for them to attack larger problems than a programmer. If all you need is dragging some controls onto a .NET form in order to do some data capture and shove it in a database, then you only need a programmer. But you better not ask that programmer to do multiple background worker threads, distributed computing, web services that interoperate with legacy code, etc. Its just beyond their ability. Everyone starts out as a programmer, but not everyone ends up as a software engineer.

[Edited by - legalize on August 21, 2007 2:04:05 PM]

The software engineer is the one who can program in engineering way.
There are two aspects in engineering way, one is management, another is methodology.