Originally posted by: jai6638
so ur sayn.. the software engineers are the ones who come up with the ideas and think about ways of going about it and the programmers do thea ctual coding????
From the heavens themselves, or at least a boss, comes an order to produce software that does action A. First step is pure common sense: if there already exists software that accomplishes the job at a reasonable expense of resources, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. This is just the start of modular thinking that even trickles down to object oriented programing languages.
A software engineer will take the task and split it into smaller jobs. His job is to make sure that those jobs get done right, and connect the bits into a whole. On a large scale this could be functions of a large office suite. On a smaller scale a C program may have 10 functions, each written by a different programer and it's all put together to act in the main program, int main() for a class project. (or void Main if you want to upset a Prof )
The full answer is much more complex than that. A guy named Linus started a decent OS almost on his own, and a small group of guys wrote Wolfinstein without a strict seperation. However people cranking out code, for the most part, are working with very little knowledge of the whole project. That's about as simple as I could put it, as they are just titles that don't always have defined jobs in real life.