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.
TBH most of us don’t get to build large systems, and arguably AI is kinda OK for small systems nowadays .
I looked at the tasks of previous 3 months, and most of them can be divided into 3 catalogs:
1. Scoping tickets — gathering requirements. We don’t have any AI chatbots so I don’t know how AI fairs. However, this is also the least interesting and most frustrating part of the work, so ironically I’d rather AI takes over.
2. Small new features or incremental improvements on old features — arguably AI can perform pretty much all of the tasks in this catalog. Some of my colleagues are literally checking in vibe coded PR without any review, and so far we have been fine. I still code by hand sometimes just because I like it. But half of my code is done by AI nowadays.
3. Debugging issues. There are two types of issues, business logic issues or system issues. The first type is boring and frustrating because it usually ends up with clarifying requirements with humans. AI is surprisingly good at pointing out where the issues could be. The second type is more interesting, e.g. Spark issues. AI is way better than anyone in the team for this type of issues, probably because there are so much similar problems in the training material. I’d read through pages after pages of system logs, just for fun, but sometimes I still needed AI for a quick diagnose.
I don’t see AI replacing myself ATM, but I do think it is very likely that companies will no longer need this many programmers in the near future. I also see that smaller companies, like ours, will no longer hire junior programmers (we haven’t for two years, and we have 250+ people so not that small).
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.
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)
Quite a few years ago, Erik Dietrich proposed "efficiencer": https://daedtech.com/starting-tech-firm-efficiencer/
I've always liked that term and it's more fitting than ever.
Software engineer. Put the AI stuff in the bullet points. Nobody has ever been hired for a title.
I've been using "Mad Computer Scientist" for 26 years now as my official title.
I think the value is shifting: it's moving from actually building the thing to deciding what to build: Product Engineer?
Agent Babysitter
Solutions engineer. You’re solving problems with a non deterministic natural language compiler, context in, code out.
yeah this is probably the one.
i think it’s going to be a mix of product design and maybe a mix of sales/marketing/etc. involved so that engineers can steer the ai to a solution.
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.
Software Whisperers
Software steward?
code jockey / code monkey
Con(text) Artist
Developtisaurus
Enabler
Sorry, the correct answer is Forward Deployed Engineer, your job now is to move the slop forward to the customer
In 95% of all cases - slopper/clanker.