I'm a software architect and project manager. I recently joined a telehealth company who had a bunch of coders that I replaced with engineers.

To me the main difference between a coder and an engineer is how engineers think of software a whole where coders execute the tasks they are assigned without necessarily seeing the big picture.

The most visible aspect in a distributed architecture was the redundancy of the code case, the lack of common APIs although they were serving the same endpoints and an overall lack of care for performance.

I would love to start coding on the P3 platform, unfortunately I'm a terrible handyman so I don't plan on building from scratch, but I would surely like to find a plug and play hardware for a start.

I think coder is a different job that fits some organizations, typically the ones that have more layers between the functional specifications and the end product.
Coders also fits software that are at a more advanced part of their lifecycle where they need updates and bug fixing.

So I don't think a coder is a bad developer in essence, they just come in play once the foundations are laid out.

Does anyone work with product teams internally ? Half of my projects are "Product driven" as in they build a UI abstract of any kind of what's doable in the existing architecture/software without a big overhaul.

So I end up being the party killer, I waste a huge amount of time and the only conclusion becomes "Ok when can you do it ?"

I'm interested to hear about how you deal with that and you manage to keep some kind of much needed consistency