Ok so can anyone explain the difference between a software engineer and developer in terms of skills? Is there something specific a software engineer can/should do that a developer cannot? Or is it just the demands of each job?
Varies a lot company to company. Most of the HR people you’ll deal with can’t figure out the difference between the two and they’re the ones writing the job postings.
I wouldn’t get caught up too much over terminology.
I kept referring to myself as a developer. My company keeps referring to me as a software engineer. So now I refer to myself as a software engineer too. Sounds fancy.
I think that my job covers all its bases by labeling me as a “Software Development Engineer” or something like that. There isn’t a special distinction with job functions, although what a company calls its programmers can give you some clues about the company culture.
The technical definitions are quite different. But the reality is that in industry, the 2 terms are used loosely and interchangeably.
To be nit picky, software engineering is a well defined methodology for developing and maintaining large scale systems. You can get a degree in software engineering that will follow a structured set of courses that will be similar no matter where you go. The department of defense funds a software engineering institute. A software engineering curriculum is well defined and standardized by IEEE.
Software development is not well defined. It can be a lot of different complex things. And consequently nobody offers a degree in software development.
Also you can think of it as this - actual software engineering focuses on design and planning and development is basically one phase of software engineering. And development can be anything whereas the software engineering part is sort of a universal methodology. Finally you can apply software engineering to web development, or you can just leave it out. And one more finally - the development side is typically harder than applying software engineering principles.
But again the reality is that the terms are tossed around loosely.
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