I noticed that for web developers "developers" is a synonym of "web developer". Being a non-web developer, I find this at the same time mildly amusing and offensive.

This, some people recently forwarded a "tech pay" survey to all dev teams (ours does C++/Qt desktop software), and there was only (basically) "Frontend dev", "Backend dev" and "AI/ML dev" in the job list.

It reminded me of that KotH skit "- So, are you Chinese or Japanese? - Huh, I come from Laos and... - Chinese, or Japanese?".

Crooter: "So tell me about your work at XXX Robotics. Was it more front-end or back-end?"

Me: "It was robot control software. It controlled a robot. Also I did some UI work, based on the same framework as the control software itself."

Crooter: "Ah-huh, and which database did you use? Oracle? MySQL?"

I feel the opposite. Sometimes I feel non-web developers don’t consider web devs as “real devs”, esp. the frontend ones.

This is an extremely mild version of what it feels like to be a minority. Web developers are the most common type of developer. It is simply natural for them to equate "developers" and "software developers". Out of sight, out of mind. It's not a hostile thing, it's not something people necessarily want to do. But it still happens. It's a human thing.

No kidding! But "software engineer" also makes me think web dev.

Compared to "programmer" or "developer", it just sounds like gluing bits of CRUD together and making it seem more advanced than it really is by way of fancy title. "Prompt engineer" being the natural next step.

Sorry if you're called/call yourself a SE, (probably) nothing against you personally :D

this, i'm FW engineer, most of my time is spent writting code, so i can classify myself as SWE i guess.

I've never touch JS in my daily work, or html, or php, or anything like that. Also no golang or whatever the cool kids are using. When i said i'm developer, people always assume i'm some web developer lol. Lady i know how tcp/ip work, but anything higher is a strange land to me.