What's in a Name?

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Obligatory Shakespeare reference:
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
Software engineer, software developer, programmer, programmer analyst, systems analyst, code monkey...

I always find it frustrating that there are so many different job titles for more or less the same thing. And that's not even getting into specialties (and sub-specialties!) like web, embedded systems, mobile, front-end, back-end etc. etc. If pressed I would say I consider myself a software engineer because of the sheer amount of studying I've done/am doing including that whole 4.0 on a masters degree thing, plus the wide variety of tasks I'm both capable of and currently responsible for (despite the school of thought that says nobody can be called "engineer" unless they've taken a professional engineer exam; the exam in question was discontinued due to lack of interest, so...). Anyway that's what I put on my LinkedIn. But NMSU has some weird rules about job titles; since I don't work for the main campus IT department I'm technically not allowed to be called a software engineer. Technically my job title is "software developer", which is now how I mostly refer to myself out of habit.

Apparently I am not the only one confused, because I recently saw a job listing for a "software engineer developer" (no / or , or anything, just like that). Perhaps I will start calling myself that. Or even "software engineer developer programmer", as I've seen on some job sites. Throw it all in there and see what happens, right?




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