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In my experience people who care or get hung up on this term are not people I think are great programmers/coders. I like programming because it’s easy to ignor

In my experience people who care or get hung up on this term are not people I think are great programmers/coders. I like programming because it’s easy to ignore labels and just look at output to see if they are terrible or decent. Takes some time to distinguish decent or great, but it’s easy to see if someone is just horrible. I’ve never cared if I’m programmer or coder or developer or engineer. It’s not like there’s legal differences like medicine or law (some places do have engineer labels, but no states where I’ve worked). I really care about ability to make an impact and compensation. Some of the stupidest titles I’ve had were most interesting work. It seems odd to try to pick the right term as even for recruiting it’s probably better just to state the label, duties, and skills required in order to attract people.

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
I know that HN policy is never to ask if someone read TFA but ... the focus of TFA is much more on how there used to (at least) two distinct tasks which got different names (and had socio-economic and gender implications); following the development of "automatic programming" (what we would call compilation today), this distinction went away, but the two terms stuck around.
codelikeawolf 2y ago
I'm with you on this one. I really don't care what my title is or what I'm referred to as long as the check clears. When people ask what I do, I say I'm a "software engineer" because I spent several years getting a BS in mechanical engineering, I've worked in several non-software jobs with "engineer" in the title, and the work is very similar. One could argue that only licensed engineers can actually call themselves "engineers", but that's not the way it works in America. From what I understand, the work of a licensed engineer is not much different from that of unlicensed engineers, it's mostly a liability and compliance thing. That's not a dig at licensed engineers, by the way. Being legally liable for your engineering work translates to requiring more rigor and attention to detail than it would when you're not on the hook for failures. One of my professors in college was a licensed engineer. He said it was a colossal PITA to maintain his license, so he let it lapse.
bee_rider 2y ago
Plenty of mechanical engineers can’t swing a hammer very well.

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago

I know that HN policy is never to ask if someone read TFA but ... the focus of TFA is much more on how there used to (at least) two distinct tasks which got different names (and had socio-economic and gender implications); following the development of "automatic programming" (what we would call compilation today), this distinction went away, but the two terms stuck around.

codelikeawolf 2y ago

I'm with you on this one. I really don't care what my title is or what I'm referred to as long as the check clears. When people ask what I do, I say I'm a "software engineer" because I spent several years getting a BS in mechanical engineering, I've worked in several non-software jobs with "engineer" in the title, and the work is very similar. One could argue that only licensed engineers can actually call themselves "engineers", but that's not the way it works in America. From what I understand, the work of a licensed engineer is not much different from that of unlicensed engineers, it's mostly a liability and compliance thing. That's not a dig at licensed engineers, by the way. Being legally liable for your engineering work translates to requiring more rigor and attention to detail than it would when you're not on the hook for failures. One of my professors in college was a licensed engineer. He said it was a colossal PITA to maintain his license, so he let it lapse.

bee_rider 2y ago

Plenty of mechanical engineers can’t swing a hammer very well.