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Discussion on: I don't want to be a {*} developer

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khuongduybui profile image
Duy K. Bui • Edited

I agree that {language, or even worse, framework} Developer is a bad brand that no developers would like to wear (for a long time).

You can happily call yourself a "software developer" for as long as you want. But eventually, most people will figure out they love something and stay with it for some time. So you can be a "system developer" for 10 years, or "front-end developer", "full-stack developer", etc. Some people will love a technology so much they spend a lot of time on it and only want to work with it; they will happily brand themselves "Docker developer" (instead of container developer) or "AWS engineer" (instead of cloud engineer). And that's fine too.

But that's what we call ourselves (titles).

What the companies call us (positions) do not depend on what we do but rather what we provide them. So I'm a full-stack developer who currently fills a Rails developer role, for example, and I'm totally fine with that too. To that company, all they need from me is my Rails skill. I can switch to an Angular developer position in the company or elsewhere if I want to do that for a few years, and that's fine too.

I guess I'm rambling at this point, but the main idea is don't let the position define your title. One tells what your employers expect from you, while the other tells what you could provide; and these two only need to overlap enough to keep both sides happy :)