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Posted by umerf 5 hours ago

A Family Tree of Software Job Titles(zwischenzugs.com)
163 points | 74 commentspage 3
kristianc 4 hours ago|
> In 1947 coding was the clerical bit, and the real work was in the planning.

A tale which of course, flatters the planners…

jsrcout 4 hours ago|
Heh heh. Meanwhile in 2026, the developers are doing the real work, including those heavily employing AI. Which flatters me :-)
oldjohnnylane 1 hour ago||
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.
zekenie 3 hours ago||
Where’s member of technical staff?
bee_rider 4 hours ago||
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.
pona-a 35 minutes ago|
Software is just an extension of electrical engineering, only with the small technical difference that instead of building circuits that process signals, you write instructions for a pre-made Turing machine instead. FPGA engineers are clearly digital engineers, if they want they could write out their circuits with diagrams, though most use code, because it's more compact, easy to modify, and is easier to operationalize with version control and testing. The only thing different from software is the depth of our abstractions, and the scope of our problems.

A lot of said complexity is ultimately because we haven't embraced software as an engineering discipline but as rules lawyering. We've lost sight of actual engineering goals like cost and size, and ventured far into the world of marketing, rushing to implement every feature instead of building a sound system first, causing immeasurable economic harm in product defects, engineer burn-out, and missed opportunity.

lorenzohess 2 hours ago||
Where is Prompt Engineer?
enjoyyourlife 1 hour ago|
It wasn't a software role
weinzierl 2 hours ago||
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.
yuppiepuppie 2 hours ago||
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?

bodash 24 minutes ago|
Another path: “fullstack” -> “product engineer”
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