Please don't do programming flamewars here. They aren't interesting, and past experience has shown that they can destroy a forum.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Ironically, your comment is an example of a narrow view mindset that software engineers who work on React and Javascript are somehow not equivalent to "real" engineers. I don't think that's a balanced view in an industry where a large percentage of companies have web-related products and employ engineers to work on them.

I also imagine that neither configuring a few hundreds of routers in an industrial setting could be called a hobby.

But I wouldn’t call myself an engineer for swapping a wheel on my car.

But I would call myself an engineer if I were responsible for a small business making car wheels, even if we were not doing any R&D.

For someone to be a software engineer, they can never target the web?

I notice that developers do you really like to mention quite often that they are "engineers".

There's two ways to evaluate the comment.

Truth is almost none of us are "engineers". (meaning a very strict discipline, often with licensing, and with very real consequences for failure after you sign off on something) I'm fine with that, but I'm also fine with the colloquialism of "software engineer" (same way I'm ok with "crypto" meaning "cryptocurrency" if we all have an understood context)

However, I usually interpret comments like this to suggest things like the backend is "real software engineering", which while being literally incorrect, it's also a very narrow view of our craft. I think the pushback is similar to the traditional ops folks pushing back against "devops" or the way people make the same, predictably pedantic comments about any "serverless" article: it represents an encroaching on their expertise.