Dane Carlson has a link to an article I found interesting:

Are developers programmers or engineers? "'The act of constructing software is, in fact, not an engineering process,' Cooper said. 'Engineering to me is problem-solving, which is very different from solution implementations, which is what programmers [do].' Title inflation is endemic to the industry, he said. 'Web designers are called programmers, programmers are called engineers, and engineers are called architects, and architects don't seem to ever get called,' Cooper exclaimed." [From the Desktop of Dane Carlson]

This is exactly the kind of thing that happened at my last job. I remember having someone there who was at most a web designer. He'd learned HTML and some ASP and that was enough to make him a 'programmer'. The issue was that he didn't have any real programming experience. I think a lot of his had to do with the sudden growth of the dot com world. People were looking for anyone they could get to do programming.