Whats the difference, I’ve noticed the big company’s hire “front end engineers” which should I use as my title in my resume? Is there a difference?
Just company preference in terms of what they like to call their positions. From my experience, any company that uses “Engineer” is definitely going to require a college degree in a STEM field.
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Truthfully I’m making business cards to hand out at a big developer meeting, is Front-end Engineer a bad idea for me to put on my card, should I just go with Front-end Developer?
front end engineer insinuates you know some things that come with the more computer science educational route. in my opinion, It would be best to put developer instead, unless your familiar with the computer science aspect and are comfortable with things like O(n).
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I actually do understand O(n) to an extent, tho i understand what you mean, I just don’t know if I’m hurting myself by using one or the other, Engineer seems to look better, but idk. Just having a really hard time deciding this, as I would like to make a good impression.
For what its worth I dont think you’re hurting yourself using one rather than the other 
To me, “software” and “engineering” don’t go hand in hand. The bar for “engineering” is very much higher.
And “agile” and “engineering” definitely don’t go together. Imagine a bridge or structural, mechanical or electrical engineer saying “we’ll wing it, and fix these problems on next version 1.01b of our build”
Most of my job titles have been “Software Engineer”. And I work and have worked in agile groups that include software engineers, firmware engineers, and electrical engineers. There are good arguments to be made against calling software design an engineering field, but it’s the current industry trend.
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It doesn’t matter either way. I’m currently hiring Front End Developers and the job title on applicant’s CV really doesn’t matter. The main thing is what you talk about after your job title:
- what projects have you worked on?
- what was your contribution to these projects?
- which technologies are you strongest with?
The important thing is what can you actually do rather than what do you call yourself.
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Engineers usually know DevOps also, or so I have noticed when reading actual job listings. They don’t necessarily require a degree, but most do.
The waters are murky here. I have never worked in the software industry but I am an engineer by trade (mechanical) and have worked in manufacturing and design of manufacturing, some of the principles of lean manufacturing, that took off in the 70’s and 80’s, have been retrofitted and applied to “agile”, so there is some correspondence, for example user stories are nothing more than specifications.
Also, some of these projects here on fcc, especially the latter full stack ones, have enough moving parts and are dynamic enough to warrant an ‘engineering’ perspective, or at least warrant you to attack the problem in an’engineering’ type of way, if that makes sense.
I asked Quincy on Twitter, he said to go with engineer, so i’m going with that.