A Family Tree of Software Job Titles
Summary
This article traces the evolution of software job titles from the 1940s to today, highlighting patterns like titles splitting and recombining, recycling of names, and the rise of AI-related roles. It uses a data-driven source (a family tree and accompanying notes) to illustrate how industry trends shape job labeling, with insights into DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering. It also links to a visualization and discusses the ongoing debate around DevOps and operations roles.