Closing Keynote with Leslie Lamport at Scale 22x: Coding Isn't Programming

Re:Closing Keynote with Leslie Lamport at Scale 22x: Coding ... by II2II on Tuesday March 25, 2025 @09:20AM (#43470881)

> Coder, programmer, software engineer call yourself whatever you want, the point is to make a computer do what you want it to do.

The distinction is important because how you make the computer do things is important in many cases. At one end of the spectrum, your wasting resources if you have a software engineer working on a program that will be used for 5 years. At the other end of the spectrum, you're setting yourself up for pain if the program is going to be in use for 30 years (or is safety critical, or must produce verifiable results, or ...).

This isn't to say that the "hierarchy" should reflect some sort of software developer social class. It's just different skill-sets for different purposes.

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Re:Closing Keynote with Leslie Lamport at Scale 22x: Coding ... by TimPC on Tuesday March 25, 2025 @09:23AM (#43470925)

When I made this decision 20 years ago I landed on Software Engineer because people calling themselves that generally earned more than people calling themselves programmer, coder or developer.

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Re:Closing Keynote with Leslie Lamport at Scale 22x: Coding ... by umanwizard on Tuesday March 25, 2025 @09:46AM (#43471237)

This hierarchy doesn’t actually exist in real life. Software engineer, programmer, “member of technical staff”, etc. are just all used interchangeably, at least in the US.

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