Please note that your list (electrical engineers, computer programmers, and biotechnologists...) is one that I might have produced, too, and that engineers involved in manufacturing somehow wouldn't fit.

What are those engineers called, anyway? And why isn't this name immediately obvious?

Googling suggests that there isn't even agreement on a name -- "industrial engineering", "production engineering", and "manufacturing engineering" are all applicable, and get a similar number of hits. None sounds high-status to my ear. How many top universities in the US have a department? -- a program? -- a course?

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