Ask HN: What's a good title for a software engineer now?
Going with the premise that "software engineer" or "developer" is a dead-end because code is very cheap to produce now, I need something to market myself as.
This is what I think: we will go through all of these other titles and then come back to software engineer (e.g. remember Prompt Engineer?).
The reason IMO is that true software engineering hasn’t been about producing code. It’s about solving problems by building maintainable systems. The best software engineers don’t only build for the feature, they build for the extensibility, maintainability, and scalability of the feature. That is the art of engineering software that I think we can still take pride in even during this AI era.
Software product manager might be a good fit. Personally, I'd go with programmer, the same thing I've used for decades. Being retired does remove the need for title inflation.
Since there's no statutory legal liability for the product of one's work, nor state licensure, the term Engineer isn't appropriate, and never has been. (But that's a pet peeve of mine, apparently not shared by the majority here)
Engineer was almost never appropriate before. Very few people writing software ever measured anything or innovated anything new. Now, if you are not writing code I cannot imagine how developer would be appropriate.
For people who just feed agents I would use the title: trainer.
I get it from the linkedin and marketing side (I might need to face this marketing needs too), but why do we think is software engineer/developer not representative anymore? The job from an external observer is basically the same with or without clanker usage, you use some HMI to interact with a computer and shove around logic an data to develop digital running artifacts/products. Do they (the people who are in the market for human software generators) even care? If its a purely marketing thing I guess throwing an AI in there is enough eg: AI Native Software/Product/Platform/YourFavouriteDomain Engineer.
The reason IMO is that true software engineering hasn’t been about producing code. It’s about solving problems by building maintainable systems. The best software engineers don’t only build for the feature, they build for the extensibility, maintainability, and scalability of the feature. That is the art of engineering software that I think we can still take pride in even during this AI era.
Since there's no statutory legal liability for the product of one's work, nor state licensure, the term Engineer isn't appropriate, and never has been. (But that's a pet peeve of mine, apparently not shared by the majority here)
I've always liked that term and it's more fitting than ever.
For people who just feed agents I would use the title: trainer.