Then again though it sounds like you're shutting down the conversation when people ask - that's probably not good.

Depends who is asking. I have discovered that in many social situations, people don't really want an elaboration or know details. It's a "friendly" question and they want to try to relate. Perhaps with a followup like "my friend works on computers", "like apps on the iPhone?", or "oh, wow, I never got into all that tech stuff."

If they're actually interested and want to hear more, they'll follow up more detailed questions.

I'm pretty sure it's the same for anyone with specialised/deep skills.

Not necessarily. Some people ask me at what company I'm working or they want to find out more details about my work, e.g. what kind of products I'm building.

My biggest pet peeve, which perhaps is my own bias is that when someone says "programmer", I take it that they pretty much know how to use an if statement, loops, call functions, but that's it. You can hire people on Rentacoder and elance with that skillset for < US $10 an hour.

I guess "programmer" doesn't capture the bulk of the value of someone with a computer science background. But maybe there's my problem. Non-techies probably equate CS with just programming anyways.

My bias is exactly the opposite; I assume that anyone calling themselves a "software developer" or a "software engineer" is probably more interested in implementing a design pattern than writing good code, and probably knows about as much about computer science as he read on Coding Horror.

I think both of our biases are dumb.

There's something to be said about purposely inflating one's title to sound cooler (there's certainly bad people graduating with CS degrees), but let's set that point aside for a moment.

Sounds to me like you saying that implementing a design pattern != good code?

An example of my bias is more towards something like this:

(1) someone with a CS background is more likely to notice and inefficient algorithm and know how to optimize it

(2) someone who just knows how to code in a language may not be aware of the presence of a suboptimal algorithm, much less know how to optimize it

How do you explain to a non-technical person the difference and importance between (1) and (2)? I guess it's going to be difficult, but I was curious if anyone was able to easily convey (1) or (2) in a quick short introductory pitch.

Well, the stereotype I was shooting for was someone who overarchitects things and who is really shackled to some particular set of concepts, methodologies, and tools; the sort of person who will go on implementing "factories" and "strategies" in languages and situations where they don't apply.

Personally, if I were tasked to explain that distinction, I would shorten (1) to "a good programmer" and shorten (2) to "a bad programmer."

You are right when you say that programming sounds like a fraction of the big picture, but there are good and bad programmers.

Also, I don't know how things are in other countries, but in Romania when you hire someone, the contract must specify an occupation from a national list. Most labor contracts that I know of, use "programmer", not "developer" or "engineer".

By the way, there were some problems a couple of years ago with a few jobs imported from Western countries. If I remember correctly, two of them were "credit officer" and "key account manager".