There was also a distinction at one time between what amounted to "people who wrote code" and "people who designed software". The writing code was the 'lower' of the two and the 'design' description included overseeing the other classification.
You can see this by poking at the Wayback for this page:
* 2012 - Programmers & Developers ( http://web.archive.org/web/20120416044322/https://www.bls.go... ) (and a catch all "Web Developers" with a bunch of other stuff - maybe a holdover from the webmaster?)
* 2014 - Programmers & Developers & Web Developers ( http://web.archive.org/web/20140627205116/http://www.bls.gov... )
* 2021 - Programmers, Developers, & Web Developers and Digital Designers - http://web.archive.org/web/20210331093730/https://www.bls.go...
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Another way of looking at this is https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_stru.htm#15-0000 and the history of that page (which goes back even further).
Back in '07 ( http://web.archive.org/web/20070111041207/https://www.bls.go... ), there were Computer Programmers; Computer Software Engineers, Applications; and Computer Software Engineers, Systems Software.
So, it really is a change of "this is how businesses and government see the "Computer and Mathematical Science Occupations". Lumping it all together isn't necessarily the right answer. The titles that we've got that don't actually map to what we do doesn't help.