Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice (2011)

Nothing is 'wrong' with it. You just do it at the detriment of your own career.

Nothing is wrong with it. Donald Knuth proudly describes himself as a programmer.

But a good chunk of the people reading this comment probably make more money than he does, and title inflation is part of the stupid game we have to play to earn outsized rewards.

So proceed with caution.

In silicon valley software companies (e.g. Google, FB, Twitter, Stripe, Airbnb, Uber, and all the smaller companies following the same interview & career ladder playbook) a senior engineer or L5 is just someone with around 5+ years of experience. They might have a few more meetings and spend a bit more time working on design docs, planning, mentoring others, etc. compared to more junior engineers, but their primary job is still writing code. Even at higher levels like Staff and Principal engineers, less time might be spent writing code and more time in meetings, leading committees, approving the largest in scope design docs, etc. but there are so few of these people and the bar is so high to get there that they were at least at one time some of the strongest engineers at the company, and they still code sometimes even at this level. In the entire IC track at these companies, I suspect you'll find approximately 0% of people that are so incompetent they are just unable to implement fizzbuzz. In the management track you'd find some, but even there I suspect quite a low percentage.

In other industries, maybe banking, large contractors, more old fashioned megacorps like the GE's of the world, I think there might be more "architect" and other technical tracks that are allegedly still programmer IC tracks but where the senior folks are much further removed from programming and wouldn't be able to implement fizzbuzz.

Whiteboarding Yet Another Graph Search Problem With Perfect Syntax[1] might be beyond their current short-term abilities, but I'd be surprised if they couldn't produce pseudocode and architectural design that solves most real-world problems.

On the other hand, there are plenty of "seniors" who couldn't write code in the first place.

[1]Everyone knows which employer does this.

but there has also been recent litigation and a court has ruled that having a degree from an engineering school in an engineering discipline entitles one to use the term https://reason.com/2019/01/02/judge-confirms-that-oregon-eng...

the reason for the requirement and confusion is essentially building codes and other government regulations: if you want to build or repair a building, you need to hire people to certify the work as meeting building codes; those people need licenses. But at the same time, a company can hire a bunch of fresh engineering graduates to work a such a project and not every one of them needs a license. Unfortunately, we just have the one word engineer that applies to both. "Licensed engineer" would be a clearer distinction than "Professional engineer"

The bigO crowd will disagree but even the hard core comp sci types will go much further with real soft skills.

oh well

You could randomly tap the glass and people would let you in.