What's in a name?
Over the course of years I have met my fair share of professionals with all kinds of job titles. To the cute and cuddly chief happiness officer to the outright weird evangelist of something. Then there are titles that get created and sold to you with the premise that you need them. I am looking at you growth hackers.
In our line of work, being the ones who code and run digital applications, there was a time where you would call yourself software developer. Or developer in general. Then came a period where if you called yourself a developer but not an engineer you were thought of as inferior.
Somehow the name developer was someone who could not think of creative solutions but only execute grunt work. Now there were also prefixes in place or adjectives like backend, frontend or language of choice. That was eventually followed up by full stack, which itself underwent some change in its meaning.
First it was you could do backend and frontend. Then backend, frontend and database. Then backend, frontend, database and cloud. Now I am not sure.
You see I am not certain what to call myself anymore in this day and age. Also when did that become a problem? Not knowing what to name people who do certain jobs because the tasks they perform become more diverse. Do other fields suffer from this as well, I wonder.
What I do know is one thing.
We are digital craftsmen.