Yep - code monkeys gluing APIs and data flows together.

Feel free to gatekeep about what a "real" developer is but in the end you all just make someone else's APIs talk to each other. Oh and grind Leetcode for interviews.

I think the argument is very clear. The bare minimum to call yourself a developer is if you wrote a line of code.

Everything else are degrees of skill/competence.

Would writing an Excel function count?

> Many "developers" do little more than glue together bits of framework boilerplate.

Funny, I always thought of that as an software engineer's job.

At the end of the day nearly every developer in the world is writing code that will run on an instruction set designed by someone else. There's some shocking elitism around "glueing frameworks together", but the JS devs build on the work of npm package devs, who build on the work of the browser devs, who build on the work of the devs who wrote OpenGL/their TLS implementation/libpng, the whole lot are writing code for a compiler or interpreter of some kind, and on it goes, all the way down to the electrons.

It's the equivalent of a medical professional saying their field just makes incisions then wiggles things around - debatably true, but unnecessarily dismissive and reductive.

We always work with abstraction at ALL levels of the stack. Any stack. Even logical gates provide an abstraction that can be utilized by developers higher up on the stack. I am currently struggling to think of a single sub field of software engineering that not rely on "glueing" abstractions together.

Gluing together "bits of framework boilerplate" can be immensely valuable. There's no shortage of mid-career engineers at FANG doing just that.