alt Hacker NewsA Family Tree of Software Job Titles
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So far in my career:
- DevOps Engineer (Junior, Senior, Staff)
- Systems Development Engineer
- DevOps Team Manager
- Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
- Site Reliability Engineer (+Lead)
All have been meaningless except for Cloud Infrastructure Engineer. The rest described a generalist who knows how to deal with ambiguity and (usually) has the trust with things like AWS root account credentials. Most organisations have no idea what real DevOps is. If they did, they wouldn’t hire for a “DevOps Engineer”
IME, you see changes in numbers over time but the titles data analyst, data engineer, analytics engineer, data scientist are all still around. data platform engineer or SWE data seems to be stable as a systems role but anecdotally there is less demand for data roles now due to AI (either believed capability or deferred hiring to understand near term needs).
It's fascinating seeing all these in one place with the relationships and over time. I'd love to see one with the less formal titles (I like to go by "developer" personally though it's not my job title), but it would be gigantic.
I can't see Operations Manager listed, yet I've had that title for the last 15(?) years.
Would be nice if I could actually see it. I cannot zoom in, zoom out or do anything with it.
Where’s member of technical staff?
> In 1947 coding was the clerical bit, and the real work was in the planning.
A tale which of course, flatters the planners…
Software is mostly human-defined. The complexity mostly comes from understanding the meaning of a large corpus of existing text, and then building your thing on top of existing human-created conventions. Therefore, I suggest we start calling ourselves Software Lawyers, Software Judges, and Software Legislators. This is a much more sensible set of titles than “software engineer” and “architect,” and it will probably cause less confusion and pointless bickering.
This was interesting to look at. I know it's not supposed to be perfect but it certainly does make one think about the career routes available. What surprised me was how short the path was for security to getting into the C-Suite. Although I do feel like most people become security analysts, then ISOs. Also I didn't realize that tape librarians were still a thing.
> When I’m asked what the difference is between a DevOps engineer, an SRE and a platform engineer, the honest answer is always a little history lesson. This is the shortest version of that lesson I’ve managed so far.
Unless you talk to a recruiter and they say something like your more of a SRE then a DevOps engineer and we really need a devops engineer. Insansity
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Scrum and Agile seem to be dying. I had a Product Owner and Scrum Master cert for years on my resume but i've dropped it from my current. Feels now like the ancient webmaster title of the mid 90s. Made for another timeline which is not more relevant.
DevOps is another sad story as it was a saner approach to get people skilled for both dev and ops but turns out people don't like learning new skills as much as they claim. So its meaning differed from org to org and even within the same company.