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Don’t Call Yourself a Developer If You Don’t Code
- duxup 6y agoA while back I saw someone who bestowed upon them self the term 'full stack' onto their HR related title. That admittedly hurt a little to read. But in the end they're just silly word and job titles and etc are already in a very murky place as far as relevance goes.
- jabroni_salad 6y ago'full stack' seems to have devolved to mean 'generalist' in some circles.
- duxup 6y agoI always thought it was that, kinda from the start ;) You can only know so much in depth.
- happytoexplain 6y agoWhat did it used to mean? I honestly thought it just meant a vertical generalist.
- sushshshsh 6y ago"Only call yourself a developer if you are creating complex data structures and algorithms"
- calebm 6y agoObligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/
- HumblyTossed 6y agoDefine complex.
- bdcravens 6y agoPerhaps, but this argument could be extended. Many "developers" do little more than glue together bits of framework boilerplate.
- just-juan-post 6y agoYep - code monkeys gluing APIs and data flows together. Feel free to gatekeep about what a "real" developer is but in the end you all just make someone else's APIs talk to each other. Oh and grind Leetcode for interviews.
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- kalado 6y agoI think the argument is very clear. The bare minimum to call yourself a developer is if you wrote a line of code. Everything else are degrees of skill/competence.
- bdcravens 6y agoWould writing an Excel function count?
- dnautics 6y ago> Many "developers" do little more than glue together bits of framework boilerplate. Funny, I always thought of that as an software engineer's job.
- charlesu 6y agoGluing together "bits of framework boilerplate" can be immensely valuable. There's no shortage of mid-career engineers at FANG doing just that.
- theflyinghorse 6y ago
- cr3ative 6y agoCall yourself whatever you want. There's no need to gatekeep a title which means so little in the first place.
- apetresc 6y agoTotally agreed. I regularly introduce myself as a doctor to new acquaintances, since I occasionally visit the pharmacy to fill some prescriptions. It totally pisses me off when they insist on asking me what medical school I went to, and elitist crap like that!
- klmadfejno 6y ago"licensed medical professional" != "developer"
- mrweasel 6y agoWhat if you develop software for medical equipment? As developers we’re lucky enough to be able to find industries where our education/certications doesn’t matter. On the other hand, some niches which could use an actual licensed training program. You could in theory teach yourself enough about the medical field to know more than a doctor, still the doctor has a piece of paper saying that someone checked his or her qualifications. Even a CS degree doesn’t tell you anything about a persons abilities to write software.
- reaperducer 6y agoWhat if you develop software for medical equipment? Then you're a programmer, not a doctor. still the doctor has a piece of paper saying that some checked his or her qualifications Yes. That's how we keep the frauds and whackjobs from killing people. "Gatekeeping" is a dirty word on HN, but it also has its usefulness. We don't let just anyone drive a car, even if they really really really think they know how. You have to have a license.
- 6y ago
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoSemi related but in the opposite direction: I know a PE who worked for a local trash disposal service* many years in the past. He always put something like "waste disposal and processing engineer" on his resume and mads it sound like he was dancing around the fact that he was a garbage truck driver. His clients would always ask about it as if he was a truck driver since it looked like an oddball in the context of his resume and he loved saying "Well no, I actually designed the facilities." *Turns out low margin industries employ a surprising number of PEs so they can rubber stamp all their facilities projects in-house without getting bent over by whatever PE firm(s) is buddy-buddy with the municipality(s) they're operating in
- danpalmer 6y agoWhat's a "PE"?
- zacherates 6y agoFrom context, likely a professional engineer.
- jasonpeacock 6y agoProfessional Engineer, e.g. Civil, Structural, Mechanical, Traffic, etc. They are licensed by the state they do business in, and are required to pass exams and take continuing education credits.
- danpalmer 6y agoGreat thanks, never heard the term before so I'm guessing it's a US term. This is what I understand a Chartered Engineer as in the UK, but that would normally be abbreviated to CEng.
- efficax 6y agoliterally who cares
- anm89 6y agoWho cares?
- commandlinefan 6y agoPeople who are trying to hire developers, for one.
- TrackerFF 6y agoI've been paid to create software in LabVIEW. Checkmate, I guess?
- oaiey 6y agoWell, developing a solution can include zero coding. And there it is fair to call it developing (as in continuously enhancing something... Consider there are land developers long before software. I think the author just had a very specific problem. SAP surely has a similar problem when searching core developers and tons of SAP consultants show up.
- HumblyTossed 6y agoJust titles. They don't mean anything in this industry. Stop feeling so hurt about it. I don't even know what my title _is_ at work. I'm sure there's an entry in a db someplace, but so what? If anyone calls me anything it's usually an SME. If I'm talking to someone new I usually just say I work with computers and leave it at that.
- hossbeast 6y agoAnd if you do code, call yourself a programmer
- cblconfederate 6y agostop telling me to stop calling myself a Senior Comment Developer, besides I am a well known upvote hacker.
- bee_rider 6y agoThe title looks like gatekeeping and they probably did that intentionally, to get anger-readers, but they're actually describing a specific issue: WordPress users/admins that are calling themselves developers. The problem is that they keep interviewing these folks for developer positions. That seems like a reasonable complaint, at least from an outsider point of view. Although arguably either some better filtering should happen at an earlier stage in the process... or the author is that filtering.
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- dqv 6y agoDifferent (and niche) industries use words to describe what they do. Sometimes those words collide in meaning when applied to different specialties. I've worked in an industry where people use the word "programming" to describe using a GUI to configure software. No code is written. It's just data entry. The word has changed meaning in that industry and it's not really my place to tell everyone they're wrong. I just need to be more descriptive when I talk about what I do. Don't call yourself a developer unless you renovate or build properties.
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- smlckz 6y agoI have read more code than I have written. What is a suitable title for me?
- jbob2000 6y agoAt my company, we have Technical Service Analysts and Developers. The distinction is that a developer has power to modify the application they manage, whereas a TSA only has the power to use the application they manage. Both can write code, though it tends to be that the developers write code and TSAs don't. For example, I have a TSA that manages our API gateway. They can't modify that application by updating it's codebase, but have the power to deploy stuff and write config scripts for it. As a developer, I manage a front end application, so I have the power to change the code for this application, but I don't have the power to deploy it and I don't really use it. So I really think being a developer or not is based around what you have power over as an individual.