

Ask HN: What's the difference between an engineer and a developer? - ratsimihah

e.g: iOS engineer vs iOS developer, Django engineer vs Django developer?
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bking
An excerpt from David Mosher's Presentation "So You Want to be a Front-End
Engineer":

A hacker can come up with solutions, but maybe they can’t look back after
they’ve finished and realize how they came up with the solution. They just
kinda poke at things until they get something that works. … At some point, you
level up and become a developer and a developer understands best practices.
They’ve heard other developers say things like “you should put your scripts at
the bottom of the webpage” … and you use those best practices to craft
solutions but you don’t really understand beneath the best practices, beneath
the abstractions. … An engineer is someone who can get things done, craft a
solution — they understand the best practices, but they also understand why
they’re using the best practices that they are … [they] move into an
understanding of the platform as a whole.

This was pulled from a nifty little blog:

[http://blog.hartleybrody.com/hacker-developer-
engineer/](http://blog.hartleybrody.com/hacker-developer-engineer/)

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czbond
Excellent articulation. I've been calling myself a technologist (a higher
level abstraction of engineer) but no one really understands what that is
outside of technology. I liked this distinction.

