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Comment by Izkata | Hacker News Reader

Sometime in the past 10-20 years there was a prestige shift where people started using the term "developer" for what you're describing as "programmer", relegating "programmer" to what you're describing as "coder", and "coder" to "hobbyist programmer/developer" (while weirdly "coding" remained colloquially the thing programmers do).

Advice to job seekers I remember in the 2010s was to not call yourself a programmer because that was where the bad "code monkey" jobs were, but it hadn't yet been much of a thing when I first started looking at the end of the 2000s.

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The same thing happened in the 80's when people stopped using "Computerization" and labeled it "Information Technology", which is a misnomer, in my opinion, because computerization doesn't just involve information technology, it also involves human factors - which were stripped from the field in the labelling, because of the collective assumption that people who computerized were incapable of humanization - i.e. "nerds are not people-people, which is why they can only deal with computers."

But it's a fallacy. Computers mean nothing without humans. Software is 100% a social activity. Break this rule and your software will suck and eventually fail.

These waves where someone found a new way to focus on the valuable part and leave the grunt work to lowly others comes again and again. As always the truth remains that each step in the process is relatively trivial and is is the overall complexity e2e and scale and handling edge cases that are where value is created. But that won‘t stop groups trying to differentiate themselves by looking down on others even when it is clearly failing. As long as there is a benefit to the group driving it.

I have called myself a programmer for most of my career. I have no concern about prestige.

I think some people are talking past each other because programmer/programming means different things to different people.

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