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Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

This is so dumb. I'm sorry but I've been doing this for over 24 years now and this kind of over simplification resume-building keywordy teenage fuckery makes me sick to my gut.

If you're a good programmer, you know how to find your way out of the forest without knocking all the trees. Call yourself coder, programmer or engineer I don't care your leetcode scores and your fizzbuzz one liners, and the amount of stickers on your overpowered laptop.

You're there to make the computer do the damn thing you want it to do with the least amount of resources. And of course it has to be maintainable, this isn't your bedroom.

So respectfully, sir, take your taxonomy and pipe it straight to where the light don't shine. /s

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> You're there to make the computer do the damn thing you want it to do with the least amount of resources. And of course it has to be maintainable, this isn't your bedroom.

That's engineering. That you don't want to care about terminology doesn't change that.

The point is that these labels don't matter. Your response that something "is engineering" misses the entire point. You have not shown why it matters that we call this "engineering".

I'm happy to agree that the terms have some fuzziness and that they're frequently misused, but no, words do still mean things.

>words do still mean things.

They don't if there's no consensus

And I'm sure you ain't got the authority needed to affirm that those definitions are commonly used in those ways

you're all going to upset the actual professional engineers

It seems to me that a key requirement for engineering would be that there are formal design specifications for the system (such as a car or bridge) as well as its constituent components. There are also usually mathematical models of the system that can predict its behavior and performance as accurately as needed for the application.

Many modern software systems seem to lack such specifications or models. In these cases software development seems more like tinkering than engineering.

It's also programming, and coding, and developing. They're all synonyms.

Or rather, they're used by different companies for the same type of jobs, some people make distinctions that other people don't know about, terms go in and out of fashion. They're all essentially synonyms because if there are differences, nobody agrees on them and there is no context in which they matter.

Same for junior, medior, senior, et cetera.

Except for architects. They're ex programmers.

> It's also programming, and coding, and developing. They're all synonyms.

The way I see it, these three all refer to the same things, but "coding" is hobbyist and "developing" is professional. "Programming" is somewhere in between / for both.

curious why it bothers you so much that someone else has a taxonomy? they didn't say you have to adhere to it. your opinion to just call all of it programming is fine too! but it's just an opinion

It reeks of tiktok popculture bs. It also doesn't matter.

I deleted tiktok some months ago so I missed this reference. Is there something going on now that defines a taxonomy of things?

Thank you for this.

“Sorry but”? “Respectfully”?

Don’t care how many years you’ve been “doing this” for, you clearly haven’t spent enough time sorting your own shit out.

On the contrary I think I have my "shit" sorted out.

The industry is sick. So much money has flown into it over the years without anyone battling eyelashes at the sheer waste of resources, and I mean this both from the body count as the cpu cycles.

I look at most products built today that cost millions to get off the ground and you have buttons busting out of windows, incoherence everywhere, 5 seconds to start the said product, and 2 seconds between 'pages'. Every version increment is a slow decent to hell.

It all starts with the industry self-reinforced pumped-up resume culture, with hell holes like linkedin."Engineers". Please, have you met a real engineer? One that can do the maths, the design and build of a product? You need to wake up, engineering isn't writing docker files, cobbling python scripts copy pastes together and claiming that yaml is clean code.

Do they even know how to yaml without complaining?

If you do, you should get some professional help

Take a breath and maybe step away from the computer. You're not fighting the "industry" or "waste"; you're just getting into an argument with a guy on HN with a fun classification scheme.

Fair point, thanks.

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