Etsy CTO: We Need Software Engineers, Not Developers
I am sympathetic to the distinction.  I had a bunch of applicants for a position claiming to be "Distributed Systems Engineers" mostly because they'd stood-up, maintained, and or used a Hadoop or Spark cluster in their current or prior job.<p>But to me that was more of an advanced (one hopes) end-user.  Someone who could take a bunch of large, mostly-complete logical components that somebody else engineered and then use them to stitch together a solution by integrating these existing frameworks that already provide the first 80+% of the technical solution to carry the last ~20% toward a domain-specific use-case.<p>What I was looking for wasn't somebody who knew how to use something like HDFS.  I was looking for someone who could build something as good or better than HDFS from nothing if they had to.  A lot of what passes for "engineering" today, at least by marketplace label, tends to resemble the former rather than the latter.<p>There's definitely all kinds of space for both kinds of builders/creators depending on the needs and the project, but it certainly doesn't help that the English language and it's colloquial application to the problem space has grossly blurred the distinction.