Seibel: You were the only person I contacted about this book who had a really strong reaction to the word coder in the title. How would you prefer to describe yourself?

Deutsch: I have to say at this point in my life I have even a mildly negative reaction to the word programmer. If you look at the process of creating software that actually works, that does something useful, there are a lot of different roles and a lot of different processes and skills that go into achieving that end. Someone can call themselves a programmer and that doesn’t tell you very much about what set of skills they actually bring to bear to that process.

But at least the word programmer is pretty well established as covering a pretty wide range. “Coder” is strongly associated with the smallest and most narrowly focused part of that whole endeavor. I think of coder, in relation to the process of producing software that actually works and does something useful, as being maybe slightly above bricklayer in the process of constructing buildings that actually work.

There’s nothing wrong with being a coder. There’s nothing wrong with being a bricklayer, either. There’s a lot of skill that goes into doing it well. But it represents such a small corner of the whole process.

Seibel: What is an encompassing term that would work for you? Software developer? Computer scientist?

Deutsch: I have a little bit of a rant about computer science also. I could make a pretty strong case that the word science should not be applied to computing. I think essentially all of what’s called computer science is some combination of engineering and applied mathematics. I think very little of it is science in terms of the scientific process, where what you’re doing is developing better descriptions of observed phenomena.

I guess if I was to pick a short snappy phrase I would probably say software developer. That covers pretty much everything from architecture to coding.

It doesn’t cover some of the other things that have to happen in order to produce software that actually works and is useful, but it covers pretty much all of what I’ve done.

Seibel: What doesn’t it cover?

Deutsch: It doesn’t cover the process of understanding the problem domain and eliciting and understanding the requirements. It doesn’t cover the process—at least not all of the process—of the kind of feedback loops from testing to what happens after the software has been released. Basically
“software developer” refers to the world within the boundaries of the organization that’s developing the software. It says very little about the connections between that organization and its customers or the rest of the world, which, after all, are what justifies the creation of software in the first place

Coders at Work – Page 430 – Peter Deutsch