how can i get a more respectable job title? Well, you can found your own company and give yourself whichever title you want. But that won't fool anyone for lon

how can i get a more respectable job title? Well, you can found your own company and give yourself whichever title you want. But that won't fool anyone for long. ;) The tricks for improving your resume are well known and are covered in all the books. Learn something about the business you're in, whether that's design or publishing or manufacturing or finance or retail sales, so that you aren't just mindlessly doing what the "domain experts" tell you to do. Do work that demonstrably adds value to the business and be able to describe how it does so. Learn the fundamentals of accounting so that you know how people keep score when evaluating a company -- that will help you to articulately describe how your everyday activities lead to higher revenues or lower costs. Learn to write and speak so that you can better sell your stuff. Learn to teach and hire and manage and direct so that you can improve your leverage: Why settle for being a better programmer when you can command a small platoon of better programmers? Or you could always take the (ahem) short cut: Found a company, make scads of money, cash out, and change your title to "mogul" or perhaps "playboy". ;) Of course, doctors and lawyers and accountants and architects and graphic designers may do all of these things while retaining their job titles. But once a programmer starts doing these things she will probably be referred to by some other title [1], no matter what fraction of her day is composed of software work or how much her programming education informs her day-to-day decisions. That's my point. --- [1] She will probably want another title. I've chatted with designers who are experts in Drupal and who are heavily invested in the notion that, until you actually type an original PHP function definition into a text editor, you are "not a programmer". They'll sit there, constructing the equivalent of enormous SQL queries with the GUI-based query builder, building mind-blowing spiderwebs of relational structure with the GUI-based model builder, copying and pasting and modifying PHP, typing in custom CSS and even writing original jQuery code, yet all the while maintaining that they are not programmers and that what they are doing is not programming. To suggest otherwise is to commit a serious faux pas. It's like accusing them of being day laborers.