Subj : Cobol/gnucobol
To : JCURTIS
From : Dumas Walker
Date : Thu May 29 2025 08:23 am
> > I am a COBOL developer
> When I started way back when, we had programmers, systems programmers, and
> systems analysts. "Developers" back then meant real estate, construction, etc.
> IDK when the techno title lingo changed. What's wrong with "programmer." Maybe
> some geeks thought it sounds too geeky, so they found a word to make them soun
> less geeky.
> It's never bothered me to be called a programmer. Maybe I'll become a develope
> when I change careers to real estate.
LOL, now you have me thinking about it. When I first hired on, my title
was Programmer/Analyst. As I moved up, it was Systems Engineer. It seems
like "developer" entered the lingo when we started adding "distributed
systems developers," which was not an official title -- those were the
folks that did programming for (usually) Microsoft Windows server-based
systems.
It may have been, as more than one would later admit to me, because they
didn't really know how to do the "bare bones" programming per-se. They
knew how to work the GUI framework tools to have as much of the code as
possible generated for them, and how to tweak it to get it at least close
to what was asked for.
Eventually, management, the business analysts, and project leaders got to
where they called us all "developers" and the name sort of stuck. ;)
* SLMR 2.1a * I'll have one brain on drugs with bacon, toast and juice.
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