This is almost too sad to dunk on. People running the world have never had a reflective conversation with a professional trained to help process emotions and healthily cope with the human condition. They're in charge of billions of dollars worth of resources and guiding society's investment into the future. Cooooool
pushing back on this. whether something is "engineering" depends on the character of the work, not the effect on the world. I used to think it was stolen valor, and called myself a programmer or software developer, but most engineers who become programmers view it as a (new, cowboy, kind of fucked up) field of engineering. There is even some explicit task overlap at the fringes, especially in robotics and microelectronics. Not much difference between a control engineer and a software engineer when you're both writing a PID controller. Broadly, devs are worse at teaching, MUCH better at tooling, and generally less "professional" (for better and worse).
There's lots of visible, tangible engineering (except for process, systems, supply chain, etc) but quite often it's harmful. Engineers build bombs and fighter jets. They make assembly lines that hurt workers to save money, and apps that are addictive. They make prisons. Some engineers have formal codes of ethics that don't seem to stop them working for Raytheon. Blame the product managers (well, capitalism).