Often in the IT world, the terms software developer and software engineer are used synonymously. And often when a programmer is hired, he or she is interviewed for “one of” or two roles at once.
But the confusion is unavoidable: what is the correct name, what do each of them do, what are they responsible for, who writes code, and how to distinguish between these two professions, and the two concepts: development and software engineering in general?
Engineer or Developer
Often the position is far from reality and the specifics of the work may be completely different. But there is a big difference between the roles of an engineer and a developer.
Developer
A developer is creative and solves problems using familiar methods and patterns that he found during his development process. These methods can be courses, books, forums, conferences, and so on. But the difference between a developer and an engineer is not only in the approach to education. There is also a difference in tasks, their evaluation, approaches, and roles in the team.
Engineer
It is hard not to see the role of the engineer in the development cycle. And in the past, the roles of the developer and engineer only overlapped. The lines began to blur with the popularization of IT and the desire to simplify: the development of frameworks, preprocessors, lots of libraries, creation of languages such as Ruby, etc. Since then the lines have blurred and it has become difficult to distinguish between an engineer and a coder.
But an engineer is essentially a person who has been trained in programming, computer systems, etc. professionally, in college and university. He can apply scientific methods and solve problems by precisely engineering methods.
Get a basic idea of the candidate’s skills, experience, and area of expertise through technical questions. But to distinguish an engineer, you should resort to technical problems and out-of-the-box questions.
An engineer’s creativity can be traced through a test – a technical problem. For example, a person needs to write a function/method that takes data as input and produces an unambiguous result. All the skills and engineering thinking will be seen in the very principles of his code logic, his patterns, and his approach.
After all, there can only be one solution – and if it works, so does the program. But the development process itself, what’s ‘under the bonnet’ can show us the thinking and approach to development. How one solves a problem, exactly how one thinks and whether one’s solution will be comprehensive. This is what defines a good programmer.
The same task will help find an engineer. Only an engineer can apply engineering and scientific methods to solve critically complex problems at a high level. Not just solve one small problem, but solve all problems with a comprehensive approach.
Conclusion
Nowadays, despite the simplification of both development processes and approaches, many companies, as well as developers themselves, don’t draw any dividing lines between the concepts of software development and software engineering providers. In the IT sphere, people often think in terms of junior, middle, and senior.
Often the roles of a senior and an engineer are comparable. This is a person who applies scientific methods to their work and can explain in theory and practice how the developed systems work.
It is more a question of professionalism, development, and broadmindedness than a standard job classification.
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