IMO engineer implies the same direction of thing it implies anywhere else: a deep understanding of the fundamentals of what you're building, an ability to rigorously model and optimize for the key aspects of your problem space and turn them into a solid design that meets them (whether that's performance, scaleability, reliability, latency, throughput, memory use, etc)
Programmer moreso implies just making things work, like a carpenter, by putting together something good enough using existing tools, possibly constrained by the tools available to you, in my opinion.
That said, everyone's understanding breaks down at some level of abstraction, so it's a spectrum, and you can be plenty productive and useful operating at a high level of abstraction.
Programmer moreso implies just making things work, like a carpenter, by putting together something good enough using existing tools, possibly constrained by the tools available to you, in my opinion.
That said, everyone's understanding breaks down at some level of abstraction, so it's a spectrum, and you can be plenty productive and useful operating at a high level of abstraction.