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Programmers: what would your job/interest be called if you didn't write code? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 days ago by gianni@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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A friend and I were discussing recently the interesting phenomenon where despite us having highly unrelated jobs/passions with unrelated skillsets, we are both considered "software engineers" because we happen to write code. I believe this happens because when, say, family asks what we do, it usually feels like they're mainly interested in the day-to-day as opposed to the core purpose of the work. This makes perfect sense and is fine, but between two people who write code it is probably reductive communication.

This prompted us to strip back the code-writing part and come up with a new job title for each of our occupations; my actual job, and his primary interest. The new titles were far more descriptive of the core work we both do that is probably more salient on a fundamental level than the programming part.

Mine was "software engineer" -> "video compression researcher" His was "software engineer" -> "web platform designer/developer" (using developer in the name still feels like cheating, but we couldn't think of anything else)

SWEs (or CS students): Do this for yourselves. What does this look like for you?

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[–] zenforyen@feddit.org 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

That sounds pretty cool, I could imagine myself doing that.

How did you get into such a role? Is it some kind of consultancy?

[–] Phen@lemmy.eco.br 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It happened by chance the first few times. Projects were failing and management wanted more resources, I was assigned and noticed problems that hadn't been noticed. After a few different projects with different issues, I became the default guy to call into ongoing projects. At the time I had already rejected a few promotions because I didn't like any of the other roles above my position, so I eventually asked management to create a new role for me based on that.

[–] zenforyen@feddit.org 1 points 3 days ago

Nice! That also needs some reasonably good management to see your skills and talents.

Can totally see why you might not like roles "above". There's always some point where you stop solving the kind of problems you find interesting and have more bullshit to fight than it would be worth.

Like my team lead wisely said, "never become a team lead", and I'm absolutely not interested, seeing all the crap he has to out up with, manage and firefight (I'm happy he does it while I can stay pretty relaxed and keep doing all the fun stuff).