Should you call yourself a software engineer?

Recently, I read an article arguing that software engineering shouldn't be called software engineering. I say read, but it was more of a skimming. Because while I largely agree with the raised arguments, I also think it misses the point.

While thinking about it, the article reminded me of a similar debate about the Roguelike video game genre. The name of this genre is based on the 1980 video game Rogue. Rouge is a 2D dungeon crawler with permadeath and randomly generated dungeons. This basically means that once you die in the game, you have to restart from scratch. Each time you restart the game, a new level will be generated. The term Roguelike is used to loosely categorise games that share these two characteristics. I say loosely because the term has no clear definition, and is used differently by different people. Especially someone who hasn't played any Rougelikes before will likely be confused by this. After all, most current Roguelikes have nothing to do with rouge.

The confusing naming of subgenres isn't unique to video games (When did you last try to understand a list of all metal genres?). Genres are used as a linguistic shortcut to find similar work to what you already enjoyed. If you liked Dragonforce, here are some other power metal bands. But if their only purpose is to identify similar works, genre names require some familiarity with the topic per definition. It also means that the actual name or its derivation doesn't matter. Yes, Rougelikes nowadays have not much to do with Rouge. And yes, you will probably be confused by the name if you've never played one. But you would also have a hard time understanding what it means when some band is playing Melodic Death Metal, if you only listen to techno. If, however, you've played a few Rougelikes, it's easy enough to understand what the genre is about.

My opinion to the article about software engineering comes from a similar place. I agree with the arguments that the term software engineering is misleading. But I also think that the people that are mislead by it wouldn't be helped by using a different name. Because in the end the name doesn't matter. Call it source architect, programmer, or code monkey, if you want. What is important is that people who require someone with the skillset that comes with the profession commonly called Software Engineering will find you. So by all means, call yourself a software engineer.