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this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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How often in the software industry is the title "engineer" a sop to give applicants a flashy title; and how often is there actual engineering involved? When I worked as an engineer some years ago, it seemed inconceivable that software development would become actual engineering because how could the engineering standards of care and professional liability ever be imposed? Today, virtually all software is either privately licensed or open source - there is no such thing as public software infrastructure under the development supervision of a professional software engineer (as far as I know). So I guess Mozilla can call their software developers anything they like, but it seems to be an ongoing cheapening of the engineering title - like why not call this position Chief of Software Surgery? Lead Software Counselor?
There is quite a big difference between a software developer and a software engineer. Most of the time, a developer just does what has been assigned to them. An engineer will be taking part (or completely doing) the architecture/design process as well.
This is not true at all, except maybe in very specific places (e.g. some jurisdictions do not allow you to call yourself an engineer without a specific qualification).
Software Engineer and Developer are essentially interchangeable terms and largely a matter of taste.
Those terms really aren’t interchangeable over here. At all. (NL). For the reasons I listed above. “Developer” (or “ontwikkelaar” in Dutch) is monkey get instructions, monkey do things. A software engineer would get a request for something, research and figure out the solution, then build it. Source: I’m a software engineer.
It may well be different in NL, I'm not going to argue with that. But 'ontwikkelaar' is literally a different word in a different language - no surprise that it may have different semantics to the closest word in English!
It’s a literal translation, and most vacancies are posted in English anyway.