On Tue, Feb 05, 2002 at 01:25:45PM +0000, Gary Stainburn wrote:
Hi Michael,
On Tuesday 05 February 2002 1:13 pm, Michael Brown wrote:
On Tue, 5 Feb 2002, Gary Stainburn wrote:
There is a growing shortage of *good* programmers and software engineers (is there a difference?)
I would say that there is. I would expect a programmer to be able to take a specification and, from that, design and implement a program to meet the specification. I would expect a software engineer to be able to come up with the specification as well as doing the design and implementation.
You could look at it as "programmers write code, software engineers build products".
There you hit one of the common inconsistancies of the day. You, as I do, believe that the term 'Software Engineer' is synonymous with the traditional Systems Analyst, or the Analyst/Programmer. However, other see it as simply the programmer's role, while yet others don't destinguish at all and lump everything under the same umbrella.
Depends on whether you're offering a job position or wanting one too I suppose.
Just my opinion. YMMV.
Michael
My take on it is that any *good* programmer worth his salt would be able to go to the customer, resolve the specification with him, implement and test. But I suppose you could then equally call him a programmer analyst or software engineer. He'd likely have a degree in CS or similar and would be aware of formal methods of software development. I suppose a plain-old `programmer' you could say is not entirely familiar with all aspects of the software design cycle and probably might be just asked to implement some part of the code but not necessarily all of it dependent on how complex the application is. He on the other hand may or may not have a degree and his skill level could vary. But there are a lot of people like yourself Gary who may or may not have a degree but you're certainly part programmer, part analyst, part software engineer, part systems admin...and hence don't really fit into any kind of bracket except `good all-rounder'. I'd like to know how you'd describe yourself on your CV ... (apart from `Ford slave';) But there are people who can barely write a page of html & call themselves programmers & there are people who write hard real-time systems in machine code. The term `programmer' nowadays seems to be much abused unfortunately and there are a lot of time-wasters who describe themselves as such but are really no such thing IMHO. A big part of the problem is that there is no formally recognised qualification of any sort & software manufacturers have hijacked things with their own Mickey Mouse qualifications which makes it time consuming and expensive for firms to sort the wheat from the chaff as people have been known to exaggerate on their CVs. -- Frank *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Boroughbridge. Tel: 01423 323019 --------- PGP keyID: 0xC0B341A3 *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* http://www.esperance-linux.co.uk/ Life is a sexually transmitted disease with 100% mortality.