Coder?

I’ve been doing some soul-searching after a few recent interviews. There’s so much emphasis on job titles, yet in the age of agentic AI they’ve never mattered less in our industry.

Front End Engineer. Senior Software Engineer. Full Stack Developer. Product Engineer. AI Engineer (let’s be honest, it’s the OpenAI API). UX/UI Developer. It’s all feeling more pointless than ever.

In the past 12 months I’ve seen friends who’ve never left the safe harbours of Figma or Jira ship full web and mobile apps using tools like Cursor and Claude Code. I’ve seen countless people launch tech start-ups after just months, not years, of coding. Many don’t have degrees, and if they do it’s rarely in IT, never mind computer science.

Yet they’ve become coders. They’ve used code to build tools, companies, SaaS and PaaS products. They’ve probably achieved more in 12 months than many traditional “engineers” have in a decade. They’d fail every tech test. They probably wouldn’t get past a recruiter screen. But does it even matter now?

When recruiters tell me they can’t put me forward because my last title was “Senior Front End Engineer” and not “Full Stack Developer”, despite me ticking eight of ten boxes and having 15 years of experience in a five-year-old framework, it makes me wonder if job titles are completely pointless now.

I’m a coder. I use code and the tools available to build pretty much anything at a pace that would have been unimaginable two or three years ago. When I first started building websites at 13 or 14, I called myself a “coder”. I think that’s where I’ve ended up again: a coder, a maker, maybe even a builder.

Either way, I’m done with the job title bingo. I want to be judged and to judge others, on the work I produce and the impact I have, not on whatever vanity job title happens to be on a profile. For those of us who’ve been in the industry a decade or more, it feels like we’ve just been handed superpowers. We should be using them to create the best work of our careers, not chasing another “better” title.

The best people I’ve ever worked with rarely had titles that matched their ability. They were just genuinely good coders or good managers.