It depends on which 'hacker' you mean. The 'Hacker News' hacker or 'the movie Hackers' hacker? Though I bet you could shoe-horn reverse engineering into both without any trouble. That's a big part of the problem. People pick which part of the 'hacker' label they want to apply to themselves while discarding the undesirable parts. The end result is several related terms and multiple definitions, often overlapping or contradicting.