[mek6800d2]

That's the way it was decades ago. In the mid-1980s, a headhunter cold-called me at work and asked what I did. I answered, "I'm a computer programmer." Sounding severely disappointed, he said, "Oh ... Is there anyone in your office who designs programs?" I responded, "Yes, we all do." I was aware of this mindset from books I'd read in the late 1970s when I first got interested in computers.

In the 1990s, I worked as a contractor at a very large engineering corporation and I was surprised to discover they still had developers who only designed programs down to the pseudocode level and then handed them off to "programmers" for coding. I thought this was stupid as all get out as there was no feedback mechanism in place, so the "designers" never learned of and from their mistakes. (And a feedback mechanism wouldn't be enough in my opinion, as the designers really needed to be mired in the mud of producing a working system.) This was especially serious as some of the programs ran on embedded real-time computers and the designers had no hands-on experience with the real-time OS and would not gain that experience simply through designing.

Experienced programmers do bits at all 4 of the levels without consciously thinking, "I'm doing engineering here, developing there, ..."