A Family Tree of Software Job Titles

Hot take: job titles don't mean anything.

siva7 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	mikepurvis 18 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		As someone who has been in the "robot devops" space for like a decade now, I think with robot companies it becomes particularly acute because: - Ops for cloud services and ops for deployed robots are very different beasts, so it's really two different teams that could both reasonably be "devops". - Ops/tools for robot developers is different since you're often dealing with simulation environments (local, cloud) and also managing access to a more constrained pool of test hardware, all of which needs to be able to quickly recover and restore itself to factory state after developers or their code have done unspeakable things. - Deployed units are often the worst of both worlds between multiple domains. You've got the big deployment assets of a data center but without the big data pipe; nothing is virtualized so you can't just throw away a node that goes bad; you're stuck supporting hardware snowflakes (here's a text file somewhere with the list of units that have bad CPU fans and need different frequency caps); it's like IOT but with the power and disk and observability requirements of a real server.
	▲	marssaxman 29 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		A dev can very much enjoy learning new skills without feeling any desire for the pressure and burden of having to deal with ops.

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stroebs an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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”

	▲	groestl an hour ago \| parent [-]
		DevOps requires tooling and infrastructure, and at a certain size, a dedicated DevOps Engineer optimizes that tooling. What's wrong with that?

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torh an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

	▲	NikolaNovak an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I've had the title on and off since 2018, I assume we are pretending with DevOps that pure operations / ops management doesn't exist 0:-) More charitably though, I think they are not focusing on operations despite it being one of the categories - I don't see incident coordinator / manager, problem manager, etc either.

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jsrcout an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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littlexsparkee 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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).

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zekenie 13 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Where’s member of technical staff?

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kristianc an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

A tale which of course, flatters the planners…

	▲	jsrcout an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Heh heh. Meanwhile in 2026, the developers are doing the real work, including those heavily employing AI. Which flatters me :-)

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backend_dev82 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

	▲	flurdy 13 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		CTRL+scroll wheel to zoom
	▲	merelysounds 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It’s here: https://ianmiell.github.io/sw-job-title-family-tree/
	▲	yuliyp an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		There's a link to the SVG version of it that you can navigate using your browser's normal interface controls.
	▲	carbonbioxide an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		agree, the ui to navigate this data is very uncomfortable, I guess we're gonna need a front-end developer here to fix it. :)

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bee_rider 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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ctrlaltdileep an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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tayo42 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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