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by mvanbaak 536 days ago
Fellow Platform Engineer here, and I can relate 100% with your comment. We decided to stop announcing our engineering jobs and go back to mouth to mouth for sourcing candidates for now. It's a move I didn't want to make as, like you said, it means a lot of less networked engineers will not know about it and all. but for now this was the only way we got rid of the constant stream of letters from AI.
2 comments
selimthegrim 536 days ago
>mouth to mouth for sourcing candidates for now

Well, I certainly hope your revival rate is better than your hiring success rate.

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teitoklien 536 days ago
hahaha, i was thinking the same when i read it, such an odd way to phrase it.

“Mouth to mouth” lol

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throwaway48476 536 days ago
The English phrase for this is 'word of mouth'
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throwaway2037 536 days ago
What is a "Platform Engineer"? I never heard that term before today.
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hipadev23 536 days ago
Latest rebranding of “sysadmin”, which became “devops engineer” or SRE a decade ago. It’s the people who shove kubernetes, datadog, and CI/CD tools into every corner.
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pknomad 536 days ago
Platform Engineers are operationally focused software engineers who focus on enablement of other software engineering groups through building self-service tooling and create unified platform for app deployment.

The cultural focus is placed on enablement of teams through self service, whereas DevOps is more about reducing silos and SRE is more about doing infra through the software engineering lens with metrics (SLO/SLA/SLI).

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throwaway2037 536 days ago
TL;DR: Internal tool builder
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beardedwizard 535 days ago
Elitism is alive and well in this little nook. Equating platform engineering, SRE and sysadmin to the same thing.

Platforms are often large scale distributed systems, dealing with problems like ensuring 100000s of compute nodes are in a deployed and in consistent state. Millions of lines of code are written, peer reviewed and committed to solve this problem.

This mirrors an attitude I have frequently encountered from "traditional" or "mainstream" software engineers who devalue any work that isn't features, and don't want to have to work on problems like "make my feature appear on all deployments and work well" - it's just something sysadmins do amirite?

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