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I Write Software. What am I?
Computer scientist or software engineer just don’t seem to fit
I write software, but I’m not sure what to call myself. It’s kind of weird. Am I a programmer? A developer? A coder? I guess I all three of those things — but as a group, we seem to reach for something more when labeling our profession.
Some say that I’m a computer scientist. To be a scientist, one has to follow the scientific method. To gain any credibility at all as a scientist, one usually needs to be associated with a scientific institution and publish scientific papers.
When I create a software program, I don’t do science. I don’t follow the scientific method. I don’t form a hypothesis and I don’t do research and collect data. I don’t conduct experiments and I don’t draw conclusions.
Therefore, I’m not a computer “scientist.”
Some say that I’m a software engineer. But when I create a software program, I don’t “design, build, or maintain engines, machines, or public works.” (If you want to try to argue that I do those things, follow the links to all the definitions. You won’t find anything resembling software therein.) To be an engineer, one has to go to school and be officially licensed. One has to design tangible things.
So I’m not a software “engineer.”
I don’t do any of those things. And frankly, I don’t like being pigeon-holed into those roles. I don’t want to claim to be an engineer when I’m not. I have too much respect for real engineers. And I don’t like being called a computer scientist because what I do daily is entirely different than science.
Some software developers do go to school to learn to code. Those programs are often called “Computer Science” or “Software Engineering.” I often wonder how those terms came to be. Perhaps it was done to lend a certain cachet to the profession, coming from some misguided belief that the profession needed more gravitas than it was thought to have.
And on top of all that, what they teach in “computer science” classes is a far cry from what I actually do. Computer science classes spend a lot of time teaching theory, algorithms and the like. They don’t teach how to write a good bug report, how to perform a decent code…
