I personally like to compare it to building houses.
Programming is laying the bricks, the cables, etc. Basically doing the actual building.
Software engineering as in other engineering disciplines is more concerned with making sure everything actually works and fulfills certain standards of quality. The planning, design and architecture part of the work.
For the last decades the person doing the programming and engineering were usually the same, but they are more and more drifting apart with more engineering focused roles like software architect.
In much of the world engineer is also a protected title that requires formal education like with doctors or lawyers. The US is using it pretty inflationary.
Shades of the 1980s and prior decades! In the 1980s, I worked in the aerospace division of a Fortune 5 company. A headhunter called me up, was chatting, and asked me what I did. I said I was a "programmer". Silence on the other end and then, "Are there any people who design programs there?" "Umm, yeah, we all do." I was book-aware of this distinction in previous decades, but this was the first time I had encountered it in the real world (of a headhunter). I see that we "programmers" are still regarded as being like the streetsweepers in Victorian London, sweeping out a path in the manure and mud for the software engineers! :) (We had software architects back then.)
There’s no line. Programming a a strict subset of, and is much smaller than, software engineering. Communication, technical writing, customer and stakeholder management, system design, technology awareness and many, many more are what make a software engineer in addition to programming.
Software engineering has a higher level view which is more concerned about the architecture of the whole system.
Programming is more concerned how it's implemented on the specific hardware/language, and how its limitations and advantages play a role in the implementation.
You can know both, they intersect in a lot of places but, programming goes deeper, and software engineering goes higher.
That's a reasonable way to look at it, but there is a missing component. In the early 1990s, I was a subcontractor at a large firm which had software people who were only interested in designing software, down to a medium-level pseudocode, after which the design was handed off to coders. These designers were great people, but, on this project, none of the firm's designers and coders had hands-on knowledge of and experience with the hardware and operating system (an early version of VxWorks). The coders would gain this knowledge and experience from writing and testing the software, but not so the designers.
My missing component was that there was no mind-to-mind feedback loop conveying this knowledge and experience gained by the coders back to the designers, from which it would inform the designers' future designs. (And there was no regular feedback about how well the design fit the problem and if the design required radical changes during coding and testing, although some of that is more an administrative concern than a technical one.) The "coders", by the way, were quite capable of designing their own programs - and did. I don't know why the firm had this subset of design-only'ers; they were smart and maybe the firm wanted to hang on to them and maybe "coding" roles were intended for brand new employees.
I don't know if you can really make the distinction, is anyone actually hired as a "programmer" instead of an "engineer"?
I feel like developer is the best name for what we do, it doesn't limit us to the act of coding and it doesn't make the presumption we're engineers (very few of us actually are).
Then again if I could choose I'd probably prefer computer programmer, it doesn't get confused with property developer and pretty specifically covers what we do.
Competent interns and other skilled juniors are usually good programmers but lack all the business acumen to be good engineers. This can’t really be taught in a curriculum, because it’s something that needs to be internalized by practice.
Kind of disagree, I haven't really needed to learn much about business other than what I picked up in a couple of business papers at uni, there just isn't much to learn about business systems as far as building software is concerned.
Any good degree should be covering all the software lifecycle stuff and general information systems as a concept.
I guess there are definitely people out there that have no interest in the business side of things but I think theyre outliers.
But now that I think about it maybe I'm wrong, I know a lot of business product people and even other developers just assume I don't know anything about business. At least that's what's happened now working for an American company. Working for Aussie companies it's just assumed that were sort of business analysts as well.
