80s, 90s and 00s. The increasing demand for and status of programmers resulted in titular inflation. In the late 80s - early 90s the popularity of personal comp

80s, 90s and 00s. The increasing demand for and status of programmers resulted in titular inflation. In the late 80s - early 90s the popularity of personal computing brought many people who would previously look down on programmers into the ranks, and in order to sound more appealing they started calling themselves "developers" (Microsoft played an important role in this transformation - they correctly identified programmers as one of their most important group of customers and probably figured calling them a fancy name would help customer loyalty). Google may be identified as responsible, indirectly, to the second transformation. Unlike other companies Google did, in fact, hire many engineers (people who were trained as engineers, that is) and created a climate in which doing anything useful on the web begets the title.