People who tell computers how to behave, what would you rather be called?
(I can only put 4 choices, write-ins encouraged in replies, "hacker" is another term I would have liked to include.)
@JordiGH
To me,
Programmer - uses a programming language; may well not be in an overall software shop though.
Software developer - contributes to creating software where the software is an end product goal.
Software engineer - has a design role to some degree, not just code monkey.
Coder - completely ambiguous term shared by multiple unrelated disciplines, eg. medical records keeping.
@kimreece You know, you're the second one who talked about software is an end goal product, and I think that's rarely literally ever the case.
Nobody really wants software, people have other problems that software happens to solve. Whenever it's possible to avoid writing software, most people would do that.
I guess this is why in the early 2000's they try to rebrand software as "solutions", like, here, you can buy this solution or have you tried installing that solution?
@kimreece And your hat would change accordingly? Programmer if you're doing it for Bob, software developer if you're licensing it to five clients?
@JordiGH Yeah exactly. :)
@JordiGH This gets really messy with FOSS because, as we get used to copying in snippets off StackOverflow in leue of documentation, that interior slipshod quality gets inserted in places it was never ready for. Not that there isn't a lot of good stuff on StackOverflow, but it's a messy situation.
@JordiGH I (sort of ... it's complicated) run a company that helps other people solve a problem.
I help them solve a problem by providing software that does things for them. Their goal is not the software, but the software is a tool for them to use.
My goal is to help them solve the problem, and I do that by providing the software.
My "end product" in that sense is the software.
CC: @kimreece
@JordiGH What I mean is interior software vs. exterior where exterior can in a large company mean also other divisions of the company. If I wrote a script for bob in accounting, that's fine, that's one thing; if I wrote an accounting software package for the accounting department that's borderline; if I wrote accounting software that we license to five other clients, that's exterior.