No they are not, but that's my opinion. Let me explain... A programmer can really program a computer. Think of the person that writes an operating system, a

No they are not, but that's my opinion. Let me explain... A programmer can really program a computer. Think of the person that writes an operating system, a bootprom, all your embedded systems programmers. traffic light, very low level, operating near the hardware level/systems programming, assembly, C, rust, etc. your Linux kernel programs & device driver writers. You give them a device, give them the spec and they can bring it to life. Application developers - build apps typically using higher level library and frameworks, think of your android, ios developer, microsoft windows app developer, CRUD website developer, they build apps for users. Most app developers call themselves programmers, but IMHO are not. Take away their framework, DB and most of them can't even build much with just a language and the stdlib. Software engineer - more at the system levels, this is not about programming at the low level or user apps, but engineering software systems. Think of the folks behind AWS cloud, the sort of people that wrote zookeeper, kubernetes, Gnome, Unity, kafka, there's a lot of engineering discipline at this level. Code bases are usually in the millions and never really a single developer. Computer scientist - new ideas, refinement of old ideas, algorithms & analysis. Their output is mostly papers and with some code to demonstrate the idea. This will be the person that gives you something like the raft algorithm or some new twist on machine learning. Surely, one can intersect some or all of these, but it's also possible to be just one of these. 80% of the companies out there are hiring app developers and that's what they care about.