In your opinion what’s the difference between the two? In my opinion both terms are frequently used interchangeably in the workplace.
But I’d like to consider myself as an engineer, because although I don’t consider myself to be good at it, I think I cares about the software that I worked on, its interaction with other services, the big picture, and different kinds of small optimizations.
I mean, what is even engineering?
By that definition almost all people who call themselves software engineers would be wrong. That doesn’t automatically mean, you’re wrong though.
Personally, I disagree with your definition of software engineers needing to directly interact with hardware stuff in order to be engineers. Wikipedia defines software engineering as
So it’s all about the systematic approach to complex systems, not about whether or not you directly interact with hardware interfaces.