A family tree of software job titles

I guess telecom engineer has been kind of a grab-all title for all kinds of jobs that are telecoms related but not enterprise networking. I’m a telecom engineer (telecommunications eng. diploma and all that jazz) but I deal with such ancient (PDH & SONET, yay!) and arcane stuff that no current job title would work.

Funny how an almost 100 years old title is still relevant today.

Recently I spoke to someone who wanted to know what they should call themselves seeing as they never learned software development, formally or otherwise, but that's not stopping them from releasing AI-powered Python projects in GitHub. I suggested Project Manager, but they took offense to that because (I think) they wanted to hear Software Engineer in order to apply to those jobs. My counter-argument was that, legal rules aside, a S.E. should be able to differentiate good code from bad, but my suggestion wasn't super well received.

The point being: I'm always amazed at the cross-purpose impulse of arguing "the title is not important" while, simultaneously, really wanting to use the title.

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.

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”

I enjoyed looking back at my 20 year career through roles. I've done a few of them crossing domains twice. The tree should be seen as a constant evolving graph. There will be a plethora of new roles in the coming years.

For those who think Software Engineering roles are extinguishing, they just need to realize roles will evolve into something new. My current role (SRE) was a nascent niche at the start of my career and I didn't even know about it for many years.

I can't see Operations Manager listed, yet I've had that title for the last 15(?) years.

The chart has "Systems Engineer" and "Systems Programmer" and te text even calls out different meanings of "systems engineer", but it misses both the independent field of systems engineering, which is not a software job and all, and the title "systems software engineer", which are SW engineers that write "systems software" i.e. drivers, kernel, OS.

Before data scientist, there was data miner or data mining engineer.

I’ve always been “software engineer” or some variant thereof, but always with the implication that you pick up any tech stack and learn it well enough to be productive. Often it was not the new programming language(s) that were challenging, but some really difficult black box tool (API, platform, database, framework, etc.), and even MORE challenging, the unnecessarily complex development environment.

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.

Surprised “Web Designer” didn’t make the cut. That is what we were often called between being a Webmaster and Web Developer.

I’ve not been in the industry that long, but feel it’s so awkward that devops is in the operations silo. What happened with Development & Operations? Every place I’m at, the devops team is a bottleneck and everyone kind of accepts it.

Would be nice if I could actually see it. I cannot zoom in, zoom out or do anything with it.

In my 20 years I've been the following (in order):

  - Technician
  - Systems Engineer
  - Senior Platform Engineer
  - Lead Platform Engineer
  - Principal AI 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).

Co-founder of Levels.fyi here. We think about this problem space a lot in developing our own taxonomy: https://www.levels.fyi/t

One of the hardest things is that the same title (and level) can mean very different things across companies, industries and over time. When collecting pay information, we take great care to merge titles that mean the same thing while distinguishing those that don't. There's other edge cases like at some companies a title will be more specific (Security Engineer), while at others they'll retain the general title (Software Engineer) but specialize in the same thing (Security).

Claude has been really helpful in wrangling this all and expanding our taxonomy :)

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.

Where does “Member of Technical Staff” fit on this tree? At the bottom should all arrows just feed into “Member of Technical Staff”?

As a kid I always wanted to be a SysOp. Not that I knew what it was, all I knew was it had to do with computers and sounded cool. That was enough.

My first paid job, at 21, in 1999, was "Senior Network Operations Engineer".

I've never been able to take "senior" seriously since.

> In 1947 coding was the clerical bit, and the real work was in the planning.

A tale which of course, flatters the planners…

Where’s member of technical staff?

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.

I worked in SWE for 35 years and the only titles I was given were: junior, senior, staff, senior staff, principal, lead principal, and senior principal. All followed by “software engineer”. I guess I never worked at companies that used all these fancy names.

Where is Prompt Engineer?

These days I half-jokingly (it’s on my slack profile “position” field) refer to my self as a Serious Product Vibe’ineer.

Where does this fit in on the chart?

Where my Design Engineers/Design Technologists at?

Member of Technical Staff is missing

What's the source of this data?

Jokes on you, I'm a Senior Systems Engineer.

> 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

I a/b test titles on my linkedin every other month to the trendiest of trendiest terms

sometimes I hypothesize terms and roles, like a astro physicist imagining celestial objects that cant be detected for another 100 years

and that works too sometimes, you have to assume there is a mismatch between what employers want and what talent does

my background remains the same just what I’ve been doing the last 2 years gets radically reimagined

Another path: “fullstack” -> “product engineer”

I think there should be more domains included other than mobile/backend/frontend, there’s software engineers working on robotics/graphics/aviation but not necessarily embedded engineer

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