&gt; Although I think the reason I&#x27;m getting downvoted isn&#x27;t for being unclear, but rather for shitting on people&#x27;s self-identities.<p>Just to add my two cents, I downvoted your original comment because I thought it made no sense and was bordering on trolling. This reply is much more eloquent and puts it into perspective, so I&#x27;ve upvoted it. I think this is a completely valid and interesting opinion on the &quot;worth&quot; of a programmer, and it&#x27;s not one that is ever really explored. Our industry tends to focus too much on the general &quot;market value&quot; of developers without considering that they are more than the sum of their skills.<p>That said, I think you&#x27;re drawing a line where one does not exist in practice. Very few developers these days are paid to just crank out lines of code. At work, I&#x27;m not asked to write a function that takes certain inputs and returns a certain output; I&#x27;m tasked with building a feature for a product. This requires much more than the skill of knowing how to code: I have to have a good understanding of the product as a whole, how everything fits together from a technical perspective, and the end users&#x27; needs. The titles of &quot;programmer&quot; and &quot;software developer&quot; (and all the other variations) are used interchangeably because the distinction essentially doesn&#x27;t exist anymore—if you hire a programmer, you&#x27;re expecting them to know more than just how to write code.