After a day of dinking around with PHP script on one of my client’s servers and just a few minutes ago after reading a page, I came across the the word “technologist.”
I realized then that I hated this word. Why isn’t “technician” good enough? I think only folks here in the States use this word. That’s because “technician” suggests lower education to us so, we are snobby about it and coin useless words like technologist.
A plumber or a carpenter is a technician, among the oldest technicians in the world. I am not an engineer. I don’t have a degree in computer science. I don’t design compilers, write drivers in machine language or invent new sorting algorithms based on obscure mathematics. However I do take a bunch of software that others have written and make it work. In my book that makes me a technician. Photocopy technicians make photocopy machines work. They don’t design them so, they aren’t engineers. In this sense the only Web engineer there ever was was Tim Berners-Lee. The only engineers there are are the ones who first invent the wheel. Those of us who tweak it afterwards are just hacks, hot rodders and technicians.