Is your job title relevant? Mine is, I’m a software mechanic.

agnosticcoder.com

5 points·skorks··6 comments

I hate articles like this. I agree that we are not engineers, or scientists, or architects, or designers, or monkeys.

So what exactly is wrong with "programmer"? Even Don Knuth likes that title; TAOCP is the art of "computer programming", not computer science, not coding, and not design.

I prefer Software Developer.

The development of software involves much more, on a day-to-day basis, than programming. Some tasks are plumbing. Other tasks are wiring. For exceptional tasks it's implementing some algorithm that can properly be called programming (Those are good tasks!)

Much of the rest of the time, we're negotiating scope and features, mentoring colleagues, analyzing defects or performance problems, tuning the build system, sketching documentation, assisting support, hiding from QA, or refining our foosball game.

You are confusing typing in code with programming. Programming consists of all the necessary steps to make a working program. Coding is the part where you press keys and watch your editor change the color of certain words.

Or perhaps you are changing the meaning of "programming" to your own taste? I could just as well state that "programming" is the act of entering a program in some entity that will later execute it.

I don't agree. Often I can be found at my workstation building some contraption out of rubber bands and business cards. "What are you doing?" someone will ask. "Programming. I'll type it in later."

some of us are engineers.

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