Developer Salary Levels, 2004-2009

I got tripped immediately on "Object Visual Programmer".

after you've finished an apprenticeship as an application developer here in switzerland, you're a "programmer" and after getting your CS / SE degree (university), you're a "software engineer".

I did contract once in a small company, they had developers & software engineers. Software Engineers were people with a CS/IT degree, I know nothing about the difference in rates though.

The common usage in Japan is that programmers are code monkeys who require intensive supervision ("Devise a Java program which will read this column from this table and then perform these three checks then update this column and...") and software engineers are more senior code monkeys who are capable of receiving a broader direction (such as "This system needs to display this data") and figuring out how to make it happen.

Hence, for the first two years at my job, every time I made a mistake I was told "Patrick, come on, you are NOT a programmer".

I would guess that a software engineer gets told what functionality to produce, but they still have freedom over implementation details, where as a programmer analyst has to possibly work with clients to determine the problem and a suitable solution, before getting to work - so the analyst may then work with engineers to get the job done once a spec had been produced.

In Quebec at least, these are official titles.

Software Engineer, unlike in the US and most of the rest of the world, is a protected title. You can't go around calling yourself a Software Engineer unless you have a degree in Software Engineering and went through the accreditation process with the OIQ (Ordre des Ingenieurs du Quebec).

Programmer/Analyst on the other hand is the title you get from a CEGEP degree. In Quebec there's an extra step between high school and university. We finish high school 1 year earlier but do either 2 years of CEGEP in a general education program and move on to university or do a technical degree (typically 3 years). One of the technical degrees you can get is in computer science and your title when you graduate is usually going to be Programmer/Analyst. These are generally lower paying code monkey jobs whereas Software Engineers usually start higher up on the corporate totem pole. CEGEP degrees are somewhat equivalent to degrees from community colleges in the states I think.

You can also get a university degree in computer science. If you go that route you won't be allowed to call yourself an engineer but you'll have basically exactly the same starting position and offers people coming out of software engineering will.

"Full-time" freelancers do, however they are employees as well in that scenario

they certainly do; provided they have enough work to keep their hands busy all the time.