I call myself a programmer, because it's one word rather than a paragraph, and it's the bulk of what I do.

Me too, specially in social settings. It nicely stops the conversation about work.

Trying to decide if you're being ironic.

I find that even saying "I'm a programmer" in social settings triggers my counterparty to frantically start scanning the room for anybody else to talk to.

In social situations when that comes up I usually say something like "I work for <employer>" and then immediately try to change the subject.

> Trying to decide if you're being ironic.

Not ironic at all. I actually work in machine learning but saying anything close to "AI" is a fatal error.

I got the exact opposite advice decades ago if you want to remain technical. If you start becoming the company expert on their business processes as a programmer, time to move to a new company.

That served me very well and I remained a programmer for my whole career.

I think this is very good advice for many programmers. I think a lot of programmers become stagnant in sone company because if the phenomena you describe.