But this perspective is actually precisely why I've stubbornly kept calling myself a "programmer" rather than a "software engineer" (also, I don't have an engineering degree).

To some extent, and for exactly the reasons given here, I have *more* pretentious motivations behind feeling more comfortable with "programmer" - but it feels like a less pretentious title.

(There are some contexts where I use "developer" - which I dislike - or sometimes "computer scientist" (usually in Danish, "datalog"), because that is the title I actually earned - and is concerned with quite a lot of things outside of programming proper. But I prefer "programmer"; always did.)