22% drop in programming jobs, but only a 0.3% drop in developer jobs. It's an interesting point of differentiation. I imagine there's a lot more developers than programmers when you're being pedantic about it.
In the government’s schema, programmers do the grunt work while the much more numerous — and much faster-growing — software developers enjoy a broader remit. They figure out what clients need, design solutions and work with folks such as programmers and hardware engineers to implement them.
The other programmers call themselves coders or developers. My official title might even be "developer." I tell people I'm a programmer because I'm 55.
To be fair other engineering disciplines do typically separate the engineers from the technicians in basically that ('design vs do') way.
If I come to you and say I want to sell these widgets on a website and you develop the website then that makes you a _developer_. You're mechanically implementing your own design.
Only if the customer also provides the backend design, specifications for all interaction etc etc though.
But that's just a bit of nitpicking.
The whole question is about nitpicking though.
If somebody comes to you with a picture of a desired webpage and list of http calls to make for each button on that picture then you're a programmer.
Similar to how if I come to you with say a paragraph in English and I want one in French that makes you a translator not an author.
Sure, not everybody who writes code has this narrow responsibility. The ones that do are programmers though in the eyes of BLS.