Since your post seems to be basically an attack on my post, I feel qualified to respond. Every place I've worked has had a different title for it: programmer, developer, engineer, architect. In the end, what we did was always the same: we wrote programs. I chose to say "programmer" because I think it's an honest and unpretentious title.

Most companies do assign other people to gather requirements, perform testing, manage projects, troubleshoot problems, etc. In a few cases, I have met people in those roles who were smart and capable and made my life much easier. The vast majority do not. Most of them don't really understand the work being done and this leaves the programmer to fill in the gaps for them.

It's typical to be handed a vague spec, which needs to be turned into a set of understandable requirements through discussion with the spec's author and sometimes the business owners of the project. Then the project manager asks for a list of tasks, which requires the programmer to do some basic analysis, choose an approach, describe the tasks involved, and estimate how long they'll take. During development, the programmer has to keep an eye on the schedule, and bear that in mind while choosing the details of implementation. During the QA process, the testing team will need help from the programmer in understanding the details of the system and often in how to test functionality. Some of this might be unnecessary if perfect detailed specs were written, handed over to the programmer, and then handed to QA, but outside of the space shuttle that doesn't happen.

Am I being arrogant? Maybe. But if all I did at my job was write code, my projects would fail, and my manager understands this.

There are people who do less of some of these things. Some programmers are lacking in communication skills and thus don't do as much requirements work. Some have less experience and thus do less of the analysis and design. They damn well test their code and watch their schedules though.

I've always felt that writing code was easy, and I still do. It's the other stuff -- figuring out what code to write -- that's hard.

In reply to Re: What is a programmer? by perrin
in thread What is a programmer? by BUU

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