I woke up one morning in September of 2019 with something on my mind. I had seen several papers, talks, and other "academically approved" presentation formats that were defining what a research software engineer (RSE) is. What was the problem? It didn't reflect my experience. It didn't reflect the experiences of many of my peers, and presented a very narrow understanding of a role that was immensely rich and changing. Could it be that the community would need a source different from publication to derive our truth? What exactly is a research software engineer anyway? Did I know? I had seen RSEs in high performance computing, open source development, and of course at national and academic labs. These folks worked on everything from documentation to user support. What I saw in the real world didn't reflect what the experts were advocating — research software engineers did not always exist on some dimension between software engineer and researcher.