I kind of doubt employers read it as such a technical term that it would factor into the hiring process.
If so, why not just use developer?
Does it though? Is there such thing as a low-trade programmer? Even at the very entry level the job postings say "Junior Software Engineer". Programmer, to me, just rings of the 80s/90s, when code was a little more gristly and our field didn't have quite such an inflated ego. It has a vintage charm.
"Software Developer" is... fine. It's accurate and descriptive, just very boring (and a bit verbose; "developer" without "software" could be ambiguous so you usually need to say both).
Programmer moreso implies just making things work, like a carpenter, by putting together something good enough using existing tools, possibly constrained by the tools available to you, in my opinion.
That said, everyone's understanding breaks down at some level of abstraction, so it's a spectrum, and you can be plenty productive and useful operating at a high level of abstraction.
And it's not because of the diploma but because I am highly interested in the fundamentals of computer science, formal languages, automas, formal semantics, algebra, algorithms, data structures, coding theory, game theory, symbolic computation, graph theory.
But that doesn't make me an efficient coder since all that is required is to know a particular framework and programming language well and have lots of experience with it.
So, while I can understand the theory better, there will be many people coding faster and better than me.
I do however have the advantage of being able to pick up and learn stuff fast. Since I like to learn about new thinks I've also fiddled with lots of tech stacks and while I didn't mastered them, I've picked up enough to know what might be the best tool for a particular job.
So, beside stuff I use currently and which I am at a decent level, I am more of a jack of all trades. I don't know if anyone ever needs a jack of all trades at a company since everybody seems to be hiring highly specialized staff.
But I think my skill set might be of value when I'll be starting my own business.
But in practice, as you'll see in this thread, some people have very strong (and totally arbitrary) opinions about those words, for reasons I cannot fathom. Knowing this exists is important, I guess, because some people will (maybe silently) judge you for using the wrong one in the wrong context, and you should at least be aware that can happen.
