Sadly the title doesn’t mean I’ve gotten a job developing software. No, in this case I’ve finally bitten the bullet and joined one of the two major software developer professional organizations here in the US. In my case, the IEEE Computer Society. I suppose I may join the ACM later though.
Anyways, I didn’t actually join because of professional fealty or anything, but more because as a graduate student it’s time to start digging into the resources available in the various published journals and conference proceedings.
On the other hand you in theory get access to other useful things as well. For instance there’s some Safari Books thing that lets you read different computer-related books online. I don’t really find it horribly useful myself since you have to read it through the browser (and I don’t feel like screen-scraping it just to convert to PDF). But at the same time it’s better than nothing at all.