What's In A Name?

A rose by any other name still smells as sweet, correct? While reminiscing with some fellow exprizers today, we got to talking about the poor Interface Developer group. Those guys went through quite a identity crisis over the years.

When I first started at ePrize, the group of four or five guys were just getting used to being called "Interface Developers". Some people were against this title change as it sounded too much like "In Your Face." Um, "Get A Grip."

Apparently, it was quite a struggle to come up with "Interface Developers." This was the final entry in an endless list of names.

Before they were "IDs", they were "HSs" -- Doesn't roll of the tongue, does it? That stood for "HTML Specialists". As far as I'm concerned, they could have just as easily had been called "Code monkeys" and had more respect. They were branded with that name in order to "keep them in their place." Before they were "HTML Specialists", they were more jacks of more trades. By "calling them out their name," they were being told to not do the things that they were capable of doing and leave this up to "the experts."

This controversial moniker replaced their original job title: Design Technologists. That was a pretty fair name. In their original role, the DTs (not to be confused with "delirium tremens") were partially responsible for look-and-feel and also for creating the back-end of promotions (created via a relatively simple fill-in-the-blanks interface).

Why didn't they go back to "DT" after their period of punishment as "HS" was over? You've got me. To make things even more confusing, they eventually split into "IDs" and "MMSs" -- MultiMedia Specialists. I suppose that "Flash monkeys" would have sounded too harsh.