Redesignating programmers as "engineers", or "developers", or "coders", or whatever the flavour-of-the-month description is, is most likely to be due to some perceived stigma with the words "computer programmer". It's just plain ridiculous to keep renaming a job to make it sound trendier, especially when the thing that a person does, writing instructions for a computer to follow, is perfectly and succinctly described by the words "programmer".
I don't expect that pointing this out on Hacker News is going to make much difference, any more than pointing out how stupid it is to call personnel "human resources" and then to decide that "human resources" will now become "HR", but let me point it out just the same.
I think my software engineering undergrad course summarized it up, and they emphasized the difference between soft eng and programming with that you can really can call any form of programming as really just playing with or handling code whereas engineering involves licensing, researching techniques that involve optimized solutions and moreover adherence to some form of moral engineering ethics that might not be written as part of law.
Moreover, I don't think theres a big issue with using programmer or engineer, but I dont think that the word programmer is stigmatized but rather because its now an older term and not as recent as software engineer which is more trendier. You could think of it as how the word "phat" was used in hip hop to really just mean cool whereas nowadays kids would be confused to hear you use the word.
I think it speaks more of a change in the era where new words are considered cooler and just spread on their own, something that probably happens all the time, just like how young people adopt new slang.
In fact, if we switched the position of programmer and engineer in terms of how they were used in history where all programmers would be used to called engineers, maybe you would instead say that the word engineers is stigmatized.
I don't expect that pointing this out on Hacker News is going to make much difference, any more than pointing out how stupid it is to call personnel "human resources" and then to decide that "human resources" will now become "HR", but let me point it out just the same.