I never had myself down as a coder. I’ve always been a software engineer, and before that I had aspirations to be a systems analyst, or an analyst-programmer - but never a coder.
And I’ve been wondering: at what point did “coder” arrive - a word that trivialises software engineering so it sounds like typing? Was it because it sounds like something cryptographic? Like you’re writing secret code that nobody can understand apart from you, because you’re special? Perhaps it just sounded cooler at parties than “computer programmer”. Just at the time when most people were building their part up, over-egging the pudding and creating grandiose job titles for themselves, computer programmers were busily deprecating themselves instead. Anyway, at some point people started celebrating their status as coders, or code monkeys - to my complete bafflement.
The thing is, we only wrote code because we needed to, to realise the goal. Computing was never about writing the lines of whatever programming language we happened to be using; it was about simultaneously solving hard problems at many scales.
I was never that fast at typing - maybe thirty words a minute at most. That’s certainly what I was timed at when I took a temp job as a word processor operator at age 18, because there weren’t that many jobs around for 18-year-old analyst programmers. I just happened to know WordPerfect, and very few other people did at the time, so it made me the perfect candidate. And I thought it might be a foot in the door for a better job, since it was a computer security consultancy.
It also led to me being called into the managing director’s office one day, as he realised from a reading of my CV that I wasn’t just a word processor operator. I thought I was going to get the sack - but he actually asked: did I know anything about RSA public key encryption, and digital signatures? At which I explained about my explorations of self-modifying programs and my realisation that it’s a massive security hole. So, long story short, I ended up ghostwriting his chapter of a book on the technology of software protection. Like I said, I was never a fast typist. But calling myself a mere “word processor operator” was self-denigrating - which just goes to show, picking the wrong job title can put all the focus on the wrong work, and bury the real job completely.
My team of software engineers aspire to be software architects, and are generally quite glad they don’t have to write all the lines of code any more. And, funnily enough, it’s we as a group who don’t feel particularly threatened by the AI revolution in software production, but actually quite liberated by it. Much of the friction is now gone. Similarly, interior designers rarely wallpaper or paint; it’s about the selection of a constrained, limited palette and the creation of a particular feel for an interior space, not painting and decorating. And painter/decorators are much better/faster at it anyway.
Software engineers no longer have to write code. The machines do the typing now. The mere coders have had their work taken away, whilst the software engineers have never been more necessary. That tsunami of mediocre, mass-produced, AI-generated code is constantly moving codebases towards disorder. The engineer can now concentrate on keeping architecture, specifications, designs and plans properly aligned on top of a well-organised codebase built from well-documented reusable components. Proper software engineering. No more typing.