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Software Engineer vs Software Developer (self.programming)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by fogetaboutit to c/programming

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In your opinion what's the difference between the two? In my opinion both terms are frequently used interchangeably in the workplace.

But I'd like to consider myself as an engineer, because although I don't consider myself to be good at it, I think I cares about the software that I worked on, its interaction with other services, the big picture, and different kinds of small optimizations.

I mean, what is even engineering?

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

A dev work on some code. It works, great, job done.

An engineer comes to see this work. It hasn't been thoroughly tested, it only works on the dev computer in his coding environment. There is no documentation. There is no comments in the code. Half the features are missing because the story didn't talk about them. Installing the "software" is made by hand and only one person knows how to do that. Some libraries are used with various licences, some are outdated, some can't be maintained, some will download stuff on their own. Performances are shit. I certainly forget a lot of stuff.

Now the engineer will work to solve all these non code problems.

Now the problem is that software companies don't care about engineers because they have managers. Managers will consider engineers like developers and ask them to work like developers. They will also tell the engineer that his lunacies are too time consuming, which means too expensive, so they will go in the backlog and be forgotten.

Yes I'm disillusioned and depressed about working in software development. It's not like this everywhere. Some companies have an engineering culture. Especially when they come from older industries, like electronics or car etc. But I haven't had the chance to work in one for 5 years now.

[–] tuna_casserole 9 points 1 year ago

Holy shit can confirm. Am also fighting off some burnout or depression or both?

Get called out for being slow, yet their "fast" development time seems to be related to the projects we have to keep revisiting as they keep failing publicly 🤔

Like yea it needs to be delivered, but do we really want to be so careless with employee and customer trust? Also, wouldn't there be value in keeping things structured well enough to be consistent with our delivery times?

I get that it can be polished later but later never seems to come. The tech debt just keeps stacking and I find myself being the only one scraping up the turds.

I feel like I'm being gaslighted sometimes...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I've seen this time and time again and it breaks my heart. In a Tron way, I wish all users could ingest this and then make reforms to the Industry. Profit at all costs makes users poor.