How do you classify yourself?

Via Java.Net... How do you classify yourself?

Excerpt:

People use the terms engineer or architect to describe their role or level of competence....

My dad is a degreed and licensed engineer, so I've always felt a bit funny about usurping the term. I'm not quite as sensitive about the title of "architect", but the tendency of people to turn it into a verb does bug me. We really ought to have a term of our own.

The mainstream engineering disciplines have had anywhere from a hundred to several thousands of years to develop their scientific basis and refine their methods and practices, Software is an infant, even in comparison to the newer engineering disciplines. We're still making radical changes to the basic building blocks that we use for software, and we're doing so without full scientific understanding of what the effects are. A structural engineers can make a choice between wood, metal or exotic composites by referring to data in a reference book. Unless government funding is involved, they can usually predict cost and delivery time with reasonable accuracy, and the end result almost always behaves exactly as expected. We in software, on the other hand, rely mostly on instinct and convenience when choosing a programming language and methodology for a project. We're notoriously unreliable with respect to time and budget, and the best we can do is hope that the resulting software is going to be well-behaved when we let it out into the world.

Yes, that's it... Our profession is more like raising children than rasing buildings. Maybe those of us at the senior levels of our various branches of the profession should call ourselves "software parents". Junior programmers could be "software babysitters".