> It’s a title, nothing more. It means nothing, because there is no legal certification process for any of this.
I believe I understand where you are coming from. However, that's not entirely fair. Most jobs have "no legal certification process", but that doesn't make their job title meaningless. Not everyone who wants to define what a title means is doing so to gain or assign clout, many just want to understand what a person with that title typically does.
Granted, there are some titles (especially in technical roles, in some companies), that tell nothing more than "that person works in I. T." (or whatever your company calls it). For example, I've seen roles called "Systems Analyst", that varied greatly in responsibility -- some where all the person did was code all day, some where the person almost never wrote any code. Sometimes that was two people in the same group at the same company.
So yes, titles can hold only a very small amount of meaning, at times, but that doesn't make them entirely meaningless.
I always point these people to Hillel Wayne's Crossover Project [0]. His interviews with "real engineers" who switched over to software engineering (and vice versa) are very enlightening.
Also, watching Practical Engineering has had a huge impact on both my perception of "real engineering" and on my own work. He goes over a whole bunch of civil engineering topics and it's obvious that they're doing the same kind of work, just in a different domain, and with in most cases about as much due diligence as I have in my job. It's not a different universe, just a different neighborhood.
Some of us are both "real engineer"s (certified, legally protected, in Computer Science, etc, etc) and "staff engineer"s ;) But I'm definitely not looking to die on any hill.
I will always prefer the "developer" title, because I build things, I don't necessarily design them. I think there's a distinction and we should use it.
I believe I understand where you are coming from. However, that's not entirely fair. Most jobs have "no legal certification process", but that doesn't make their job title meaningless. Not everyone who wants to define what a title means is doing so to gain or assign clout, many just want to understand what a person with that title typically does.
Granted, there are some titles (especially in technical roles, in some companies), that tell nothing more than "that person works in I. T." (or whatever your company calls it). For example, I've seen roles called "Systems Analyst", that varied greatly in responsibility -- some where all the person did was code all day, some where the person almost never wrote any code. Sometimes that was two people in the same group at the same company.
So yes, titles can hold only a very small amount of meaning, at times, but that doesn't make them entirely meaningless.