Lots of comments here are casually dismissing a ton of psychological research on this topic out of a sense of what looks like philosophical or intellectual superiority. That’s too bad; this is unusually prevalent in our industry. When do you earn the title of software engineer? When you’ve written code? When you get paid for it? When you’ve published to ACM? When you make a million dollars off of an idea?

Humans use labels all the time. A title is just a label with some shared cultural meaning. Anything else you load onto it is arbitrary, and withholding those labels until that arbitrary threshold is met is just as silly as assigning the title when nothing is done whatsoever.