47
Software Engineer vs Software Developer
(programming.dev)
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
I typically tell people that engineering is applying physics. If you aren't directly interacting with the physical world, you are most likely a developer.
Working on an app, no matter how complex (or unessarily convoluted) generally makes you a developer. If you aren't thinking about impact of clock cycles, actuation/hardware interfaces or sensing, there is a high chance that the work you do has little to no risk or a chance of failure that is governed by the physical world. As said in other comments, engineers design and sign off on things. There is an implication that there is an unknown constraint, unlike a fully observable software environment.
By that definition almost all people who call themselves software engineers would be wrong. That doesn't automatically mean, you're wrong though.
Personally, I disagree with your definition of software engineers needing to directly interact with hardware stuff in order to be engineers. Wikipedia defines software engineering as
So it's all about the systematic approach to complex systems, not about whether or not you directly interact with hardware interfaces.