Nik Kantar

Thursday, April 13, 2017

Programmer, Developer, Engineer, Lexicographer

What am I even supposed to call myself these days?

I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time, but Dan Kim’s Signal v. Noise piece on ā€œfull stack developerā€ finally prompted me to write down some of the, uhh, results.

Having first gotten a taste of programming when I was some seven or eight years old, the word I’d initially learned to describe the person doing it was ā€œprogrammerā€. It seemed rather appropriate, and, well, still does.

Sometime after that I’d caught wind of ā€œdeveloperā€ and no, I don’t think it was thanks to Steve Ballmer. I’ve spent much of my professional career calling myself this.

In the last few years, however, ā€œengineerā€ has come to the forefront. As a result, I’ve now got the impression that we’ve starting taking ourselves too seriously, guilty as I may be of using it as well.

I’ve now gone full circle back to ā€œprogrammerā€. It honestly just seems the most accurate.

I associate ā€œdeveloperā€ with construction and ā€œengineerā€ with building physical things pretty heavily. I realize this is probably not be universal at all, but I find ā€œprogrammerā€ to be the one I can explain best.

Since I’m most definitely not a lexicographer, I’ll just go with that. Maybe I’ll also emphasize the things I actually know, like Python, just to be clear explicit.