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A Family Tree of Software Job Titles
Software job titles show a recurring trend of specialization followed by fragmentation and eventual consolidation.
What: Ian Miell released a family tree of 104 software job titles dating back to 1947, tracing the evolution of roles like 'coder', 'webmaster', 'SRE', and 'AI Agent Engineer'.
Why it matters: Job titles often reflect the centralizing and distributing shifts in technology, frequently recycling old concepts under new names to adapt to current industry priorities.
Deep dive
- Coding started as clerical work performed by mathematicians and 'human computers'.
- Roles like 'Webmaster' were eventually split into distinct specialized roles like developers and sysadmins.
- The 'full-stack' engineer represents a typical re-merging of previously split domains.
- Many 'new' AI roles, such as the forward-deployed engineer, resemble the onsite consulting roles common in the 1960s.
- DevOps remains a contested title, with Platform Engineering emerging as a successor to resolve the Dev/Ops divide.
Decoder
- Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software that uses the DOT language to represent diagrams as code.
- RAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation, a technique that allows LLMs to access external data sources to ground their responses.
Original article
A look at how jobs in software have evolved from the 1940s to now.
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