As most profession they are full of people that are just half-good (or less) and they have to make up tons of work to justify their existence (read salary). All in all it doesn’t count how you call yourself, it is just what you are, and in the end the code is what’s important.

You are mixing a manager role, with a developers, a developer, unless he is a lead, does not have to deal with budgets, cost/estimates, project management (not a macro level), and other managerial duties.

My point is that there is no difference between a programmer and a developer, it does not matter how you flip it.

I agree there is a negative connotation to the word programmer, but if you look at the list I posted most of those individuals refer or referred to themselves as programmers. In the old days (well not so old, 10 to 20 years ago) a programmer, designed, planned, wrote the strategy document, plus the technical documentation, and some times, had to come up with: budget and estimates, costs,etcetera.

Now we don’t work that way, now we have a design team, that in most cases are made up of people that don’t know anything about programming, which to me is the worst thing that can happen, because to design an application however big or small, you do need to have programming knowledge, please don’t confuse programming knowledge with knowing a language. You need to know about architecture, security, performance, protocols etcetera.

Let me illustrate the state of the problem, with a personal example:

I used to work for a company that provided consulting services to a big USA telecom, I had the good luck of working on a high priority, highly critical project for said company, this project, had: requirement docs, design docs, networking infrastructure, etcetera, and were quite detailed. Now as soon as I finished reading the thousands of pages of document, I immediately told a few persons you know like say Tamgo, or Tak; This application will have to be re-designed, it looks good on paper, but it will not work, I can’t tell you the details as I’m still bound by NDA’s, I of course told my manager, and his superior, and even went so far as to talking to other managers about my concern (with my managers approval of course) every single person, except for a Senior production support engineer, and his manager. Ignored me.

What happened? A year later, the VP ordered a re-design and
a re-implementation of the core of the application, the cost to the company? I can’t tell you, but If I could you would not believe me. When the VP was told by the production support manager, that me a lowly programmer (My position was of an engineer, but who are we kidding) had made the observation that it would need to be re-designed, he called me into a meeting, and ask why did no one listened to me? The answer was he is not a developer. I took that as a compliment.

My point to all of this, is, there is no valid reason for the word/title programmer to have a bad connotation. The only possibility I see, is, that of there being bad programmers, but hell, where I worked, there are guys that are called developers, and don’t know the first thing about coding, designing, planning, scheduling, estimates, refactoring, maintenance, testing, or networking. There were guys that would panic, to the mention of the word “Recursion”, and look at you like you were crazy. There were guys that have no idea why having 100MB objects, it’s a bad thing!

The truth of the matter, is that if you called yourself a developer, and you are not able to: program, design, plan, manage your time effectively, solve problems, be proactive, and able to learn new things. I would not hire you regardless of whether you called yourself: Developer, Computer Scientist, or Programmer.

Just a thought…