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?
a dev can build a thing, an engineer can build a distributed modular thing with more complexity around non programming parts like infrastructure. Take the thing and design a machine of parts and each can be maintained, observed, and optimized as needed. For example we can use topics for backpressure and consumer lag for auto scaling pods, but then you have to consider the distributed processing for duplication, out of order, throughput… there is no exact line in the sand between dev and engineer but that’s how I think of it.