It is so easy to distinguish an engineer (or an engineer to be) from a non-engineer. When we interview people for a software engineering position, we want to determine how much of an engineer the candidate is. That’s why we ask a fair amount of questions apparently unrelated to software. Real engineers focus on the problem, break it into pieces, and analyze them. They translate the problem into their “own words”, making analogies with common, easy-to-understand processes. Once their solution is challenged, they are able to optimize and explain it.