What are some examples of what a computer engineers do?

Drivers

A driver is a software system that enables the use of some hardware device by a programmer. Drivers exist for graphics cards, communication ports (ethernet, usb, rs232, etc.), sound cards, disk drives, etc.

Writing a driver is probably not a valid problem in computer science. It is almost devoid of theoretic content.

As an activity, it sits at the interface between the operating system and the hardware. It is almost so close to the hardware that it is a EE topic, but EE's never do much programming in academe (much to their loss, IMHO).

It might be considered software engineering, except that our software engineers never do much hardware (much to their loss, IMHO). They focus on managing life-cycles and methodologies.

In my view, academe can loose its relevance to industry unless it attacks real-world problems.

In my view, no other major in our school of engineering has the background to even know where to begin to solve the problem of writing a driver.

Computer Engineers write the drivers of tomorrow and maintain the drivers of today.