[escape-big-tech]

I find that the software industry is one of those industries where all role names are made up and change meaning all the time. As you said, just a few years ago (ok maybe a decade) a "Software Engineer" was a person who built Software, now it's a frontend developer that has a basic understanding of the backend.

Despite the terminological thefts and oversimplifications, I'm still proud to be a part of this industry. We're like the James Bonds of the digital world; we go by different names, but the substance of our work and our contributions are what truly define us. So, let them call us whatever they want... They may not always understand what we do, but they sure as hell need us to do it!

[jdwithit]

This is absolutely true, there is zero consistency in titles, levels, or their meaning across companies. I've been doing more or less the same stuff (if you zoom out enough) for more than 15 years. In that time I've been a System Administrator, Systems Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Cloud Engineer, Software Engineer. I haven't gotten SRE on the bingo card yet but it's one of the main titles I search for these days.

Doesn't really bother me, although it does make evaluating what you might actually DO in a particular role challenging. In this "SRE" position am I writing Kubernetes operators in Go, or am I a Jenkins pipeline janitor, or am I working the graveyard shift in a data center swapping dead hard drives? WHO KNOWS!

[908B64B197]

> just a few years ago (ok maybe a decade) a "Software Engineer" was a person who built Software, now it's a frontend developer that has a basic understanding of the backend.

I'll cut a bit of slack to the frontend as it's also gotten significantly more complex over the last decade or so. I've seen places where frontend means "our iPhone app". Microsoft Office now has a version that runs in the browser.