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?