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

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

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.

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 :)

Where my Design Engineers/Design Technologists at?

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

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

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).

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.

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

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