I was inspired by Hannah Smith's article on World Wide Waste [1], who asks - when did we stop being computer programmers, analysts, designers, engineers, and scientists and fall into the grey misery of "development"? What happened to creating, crafting, and inventing? Do the words we use to describe ourselves affect mental health, productivity, and the quality of what we make?
Property "developers", at least in British parlance, are greedy opportunists who ruin a nice view, and would never get their hands dirty with a cement mixer or paintbrush. "Personal development" has replaced education and living. "Developments in the war" stand in for atrocities, routs and victories. I feel I am "developing" a headache just contemplating the banality of weak euphemisms.
As we throw together "frameworks in the cloud" and "deploy solutions at scale", is an amorphous word like "developer" a way of excusing ourselves from understanding, and distancing ourselves from the consequences of digital activity?
[1] https://www.thisishcd.com/episode/hannah-smith-the-hidden-weight-of-code
> when did we stop being computer programmers, analysts, designers, engineers, and scientists
Never stopped - many many people still have those titles and/or use them interchangeably with "$x developer".
It's a fairly neutral word, if you feel demeaned by it, I would tend to assume that there's a problem with you rather then with the word.
Creating a concept from scratch, manifesting your own vision, and dealing with the business elements is more than just coding. This in my view is entrepreneurship worthy of the role "creator". There is much more to creating than just working with the text editor.
Manifesting someone else's vision, offloading all of the leadership, creative efforts and business problem solving by just focusing on the code is just coding. Perhaps the title here is "programmer".
The distinction is confusing when there are multiple roles that need to be filled. A social media person might reach out and then say, "Why don't you talk to our lead developer about this?". Maybe the outreach person can't close whatever the goal is, but the name "developer" can be interpreted as "programmer". This is confusing for all parties, because the listener wouldn't expect a programmer to close on a sale, brand partnership or other desired action.
Creator vs. programmer nicely handles this distinction. However if every programmer without these extra attributes becomes a creator the distinction is once again meaningless.
How many entrepreneurial creators are asking permission with resumes instead of self-actualizing with their own projects?
IMHO, there's reasons to find all of those words unsatisfying, and software developer is vague enough to fill the gap.
Computer programmer leaves out a large amount of the job that isn't programming .
Computer analyst sounds like you are writing reports about computer systems (or systems with computers) and it's up to someone else to implement your recommendations.
Computer? designer sounds like you're doing the visual work and not the technical work. Software designer might be appropriate, but people in that role usually call themselves software architects.
Computer or software engineer sounds nice, but are we really doing engineering? Where's the analysis, where's the repeatability, where are the safety factors, where's the independent review, where's the liability when a system fails? You do see some of that in aerospace, but not much elsewhere.
Computer science is only barely connected to developing software. There's not much science happening, really.
So we're left with a catchall of developer, because 'working in computers' is dated.
In the US I think the equivalent “low status” or otherwise “lesser” title might be just “programmer” vs “developer” or “engineer”.