I don't consider those kinds of people engineers at all. They're people who have learned a syntax, some patterns and, thanks to their human brain, can adopt it slightly to certain situations. But they're not engineers.
Engineers constantly ask why, explore the unknown and are aware of almost all possible solutions available to them. using this knowledge they select the correct tools and build the solution.
What you've described are skilled labourers.
I'm harsh with my judgement because I believe our industry has a lot of "statically minded" individuals who stay in their lane, never going outside their boxes, to explore what else is out there to help them solves the engineering problems they're faced with... and it's pissing me off :)
Engineers are people who can create a solution to a problem in an efficient and effective way. Specialists who know every detail are craftsmen who can create the best possible solution but they aren't necessarily good engineers.
> Engineers are people who can create a solution to a problem in an efficient and effective way.
How do you create an "efficient" and "effective" solution if you're not aware of as many options as possible, i.e. fuzzing for security vulns?
How is your solution "effective" if I can throw a bunch of Unicode at an input field and crash your application because the "engineer" didn't know what fuzzing is?
I've seen a common pattern of specialist devs who can write loads of code and complex tests, but never actually talk to a user or check if the software is doing what the users really want.
Sure is a lot more effective if they're good at communicating and actually meet business needs...
Not every application needs to have 99.9999999% uptime. There is plenty of honest to goodness productive output coming out of "shit" codebases that just tackled one use-case after another, never giving a care about some weirdo dumping in a bunch of unicode.
Engineers constantly ask why, explore the unknown and are aware of almost all possible solutions available to them. using this knowledge they select the correct tools and build the solution.
What you've described are skilled labourers.
I'm harsh with my judgement because I believe our industry has a lot of "statically minded" individuals who stay in their lane, never going outside their boxes, to explore what else is out there to help them solves the engineering problems they're faced with... and it's pissing me off :)