What makes you a Software Engineer? Not a Software Developer!

Who is a Software Developer?

Let's try to understand what a software developer does. They are good at programming and at what they want to build. Also, they know most of the frameworks basically good at coding. Now you must be thinking okay, These people are good. This article is not about software developers are good or software engineers are good. It to understand the difference to help your career to choose who you want to become.

A software Developer uses tools and frameworks to build apps and systems to meet client expectations. You must be thinking isn’t it what we want? sort of but it’s not what everyone wants. A software developer can write a piece of software or an entire program looking at a set of feature requirements from a solution document.

Who is a Software Engineer?

Let’s try to understand who is a software engineer. The word engineer sound should give you a hint. A software engineer is a person who thinks above code. The above code sounds funny for a person who spends an entire 4-year undergraduate program to learn to code. Their goals are more oriented towards market problems than writing a piece of code. So does that mean they don't code? Obviously every software engineer code but not for long. But They transit themselves into solution specialist or Lead/architect roles in the future. Does this mean Software developers cannot become leads? if a developer starts to think like an engineer of course you have the table open.

What is engineer-level thinking?

An engineer-level thinking is about thinking about a solution that will impact a market or an industry thinking about the future of the solution.

Example: Let's think we are trying to build software for a Super Market complex to solve their inventory problem. This is one software that would impact only that specific supermarket. But what if we try to understand a common inventory problem in the supermarket industry while trying to solve this specific supermarket’s problem. We create a solution that would help solve the common problem. And solution it into a Software requirement specification with exact use cases tangled with it. Voila, there you have a solution now.

Software engineers are a group of people who construct an idea for a feature. They are good at escalating what others wanna build into solutions as well as verbally sound topics. They work as the intermediate line in gathering requirements from Stakeholders and engineering them into solutions. They build solutions/Tools that help lots of software developers code.

They design solutions that impact the market with a huge disruptive approach. Their solutions are a re-usable piece of software/architectures/tools/theories we follow on day to day basis to build software. This involves lots of computer science knowledge. They are pretty good at computer science rather than using frameworks. They worry about the science behind the code. They think about how their code would affect the hardware. Mostly they come up with frameworks that developers use.

This might bit interesting to watch!

Key differences

• A software developer usually starts the application development process by speaking to customers/Requirement Docs and figuring out what their software needs are.
• Software developers tend to do everything that software engineers do but on a limited scale.
• A software engineer should be able to do everything that a software developer does, but with a different design philosophy including the science behind it.
• Software engineers take a bigger picture view than software developers, meaning they’re more focused on the structure design and eliminating technical debt.
• Software engineers are interested in solving immediate problems while minimizing trade-offs to other parts of the system and its architecture.

Software Engineer pay scale?

Software Developer pay scale?

Conclusion?

I hope now you might have an overview of this phenomenon where you stand in the industry. I personally stand behind being an engineer thinking about the bigger picture. Trying to solve big problems to achieve universal solutions. I personally think of a product approach for all the problems out there. So I take my chances in selling it. Maybe you could be a different person. But knowing what you do and where you stand will help you gain focus on where you want to go and who you want to become.

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