It was my first job title after graduation in France. At the time I found the title pompous to decribe a ‘software engineer’, but later I realised that developing software was much more than just coding or design (i.e., masterising the computer science languages and concepts). It involves analysing the business or application domain. We could always delegate this part to a mentor who could explain to us what it is all about, but I found this to be counter productive and error prone. Mentors are not always available and their words and concepts need to make sense to the recipient. When a developer learns enough about the domain, it makes misunderstanding and having to redesign a component less likely, but above all it facilitates communication with the product owner, to better understand the work to be done and even suggest ameliorations to the proposal. By experience, no proposal is error prone and each requires tweaks and adjustements. Therefore communication and knowledge gathering and sharing is key. To me analysing and learning at every iterations is as important as programming. This becomes even more important today with AI coding, as we spend even less time writing code but more to decribe what we want to the AI agent, or learn what we need to take good decisions.

That is why I’ve chosen the title “Programmer Analyst” for my company as it decribes perfectly, I think, what my job is about today.