Moshe Eshel

Leon (AKA Secret Geek) has posted a job ad
for a developer role at his company Advantech.
It includes...

hi,
good information, actually i am working for a small organization, a huge database driven site, and i am handling everything and we are a team of 3. what do call myself

Hi Sudhir,

Its better to call you as a Techie.

What is the difference between developer and programmer ?

Not much as such but being a Programmer sounds basic but to me the real word stands between Develper and Engineering and to my own point of view the latter is more general than the other. Since a developer will always be writing code and an engineer will do more than just write code

Not much as such but being a Programmer sounds basic but to me the real word stands between Develper and Engineering and to my own point of view the latter is more general than the other. Since a developer will always be writing code and an engineer will do more than just write code

This is a very interesting topic. I almost disagreed with Eric Sink by differentiating programmers from developers based on the scope of job responsibilities, b/c in most companies (and tech firms makes up a very small percentage of top fortune 1000 companies) all 3 needs to do some sort of documentations, interacting with other people, fixing bugs, enhancing existing codes, testing, etc, though the degree varies, but the point is that they all have these responsibilities that Eric uses to differentiates their job titles.

I worked in the financial industry for 5 years (doing tech work) before joining a consulting firm. From my personal experience, I begin to relate the terms "programmer," "developer" and "software engineer" with the degree of programming complexity and level of system design/architecture responsibilities.

For example, there are positions call "database developers" out there, but frankly, writing pl/sql packages or t-sql stored procs, aren't exactly the most complex type of programming out there, heck, it's not even OOP, not to mention SQL is not even a programming language. Then there are also positions out there that write perl ETL's or system shell scripts, etc, again, I'm not exactly sure if the complexity of such programming requires the entire arsenal of a computer science or engineering background. And neither of them involves a higher level of systems design/architecture. I tend to relate these positions as programming positions.

On the other hand, a developer uses a deeper understanding of computer science and engineering principles and applies them to design a system at a more macro level first, then code the micro level using more sophisticated algorithms and faces more challenging problems all the while keeping scalability, robustness and performance in mind. Developers typically uses more sophisticated programming languages, such as Java, .Net and C++ and such systems/applications are typically multi-tiers.

Software engineers should have the most experience of them all. Using his or her experience and a superior understanding of computer science and engineering, they typically erect highly complex systems or applications from the ground up. They are the most involved with design and architecture of the three.

Hi guys,

I guess it's kinda late however, I'd like to post somehow.
I'm a Developer in the Phils and would like to say that the difference is in the work scope.
It's much like building a simple house. A developer is responsible for the conceptual-technical side while the engineers are focused on technical-technical side.

In computers, the developer is responsible for organizing the stuffs like code development, pricing, market strategies, and flow of the project.
He's responsible for communicating between the supervisors, managers, etc.

Another example: A developer is assigned to a huge-scoped project. So he needs many engineers who can work and focus on specific parts of the project --much like a Project's piece by piece module.

Another example is a building.
You can have as many engineers as you have on a single building, each with different parts to work on, while having one or two developers who plots the lot area, whole structure of the building, budget costs.
In simple term, the developer is responsible for bridging the gap between the organizational management pyramid heirarchy.
He must know "almost, just almost" everything from technical up to the conceptual flow of the project.
Hope this helps and.... I come in peace :)

thanks and have fun.