Recently convicted Westerfield (San Diego case involving a young neighbor girl who was kidnapped and found dead) was described as a self-employed design engineer. What do they do versus just engineer? Google didn’t help. Do design engineers work on computers or software?
Could be a product designer. Cars, kettles, telephones, vacuum cleaners… Any manner of things require to be designed.
Engineer is almost a generic term now for any position remotely related to any industry that builds or manufacturers something.
Construction, car design, electronics, computers, whatever…
A design engineer designs things. Purchasing engineers will buy the components and materials needed to make the things. Sales engineers will sell those things. etc
Could just be a puff title. I’m a Senior Consultant. I was an Experienced Analyst. Any idea what I do? No? Me neither.
Yeah, sailor is correct. The “design” in the title just indicates what the person does to a greater degree of accuracy. The common conception (errr, at least I think it’s a common conception) of an engineer is that he or she “makes stuff”, which, loosely, is what a design engineer does do: figure out how to constuct a product for a particular application. However, there are test engineers, and sales engineers, and plant engineers, and so forth, whose job description is much different. A design engineer (or sales engineer, or whatever) may have a degree in any sort of engineering (mechanical, electrical, chemical, etc).
As an example, my younger brother has an ME degree, and currently works as an “applications engineer” for a firm that manufactures springs. Really, what he does is sales engineering: he recommends which of his company’s products will meet a given customer’s needs. However, he’s unsatisfied with this position and would like to do more of what he did in his summer job in college, namely, design engineering. Unfortunately, although he has a couple years of professional sales engineering experience, he doesn’t have any professional design engineering experience, which makes this “career switch” somewhat problematic.