[Xixi]

I think that if jacquesm was living in Japan like patio11 (I also live in Japan), he wouldn't call himself a programmer either. Because a programmer in Japan is someone that takes a spec or a task, written by an engineer, and "translate" it into code. A programmer doesn't solve any problem, he implements another person solution, and that's it.

But at the end of the day it's not strictly about semantics, I think it's also about how you understand you work. When I don't introduce myself as an entrepreneur, I always introduce myself as a software engineer. Not out of elitism or anything like that, but because I think it carries more the fact that I am here to solve problems, and that programming is just one possible mean to this end.

[rhizome31]

I wonder what those specs written by engineers look like. How much details do they provide? Is the architecture of the project already specified? Algorithms and data structures already provided? If that's the case then wouldn't it be quicker for those engineers to directly type their specs in a high-level language? If that's not the case I think there are still a lot of problems for the programmer to solve.

[Xixi]

Actually, my last sentence is incorrect: my role is not to "solve problems" but to "create value", the latter being a superset of the former.