alt Hacker NewsI did use the word "software engineer" there, but realistically what they're looking for is exactly the name of the role they wear: Member of Technical Staff. Software Engineer, businessman, product manager, designer, agentic harness engineer, cloud, devops, all rolled into one. They want people who can own the entirety of a product from end-to-end. A responsibility domain so vast that most peoples' first thought is to laugh, and that's exactly why they're acquiring companies; the responsibilities they're looking for mirror the role the founders and higher-level leadership in successful startups would have had. The lower-level engineers will probably be let go. They'll gladly pay $50M-$100M for just a dozen or so of the top people.
> I did use the word "software engineer" there
The reason why I avoided this term is that in Germany, there exists a quite strict of whatx an engineer (Ingenieur) is, which is defined in the laws of many federal states (Ingenieurgesetz [engineering law]). "Ingenieur" (engineer) is a protected professional title:
> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ingenieur&oldid=2... (*)
Falsely claiming that you are an Ingenieur when you aren't (by the definition in the Ingenieurgesetz) is a punishable crime in Germany:
> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Missbrauch_von_Ti...
There exist some boundary cases under which as a software developer you can call yourself an "Ingenieur", but you have to be insanely careful about whether you actually satisfy the legal criteria (see (*)) - in most cases you don't and you are thus a criminal if you do.