Ask HN: What's a good title for a software engineer now?

4 pointsposted 9 hours ago
by type4

Item id: 49916803

10 Comments

austin-cheney

2 hours ago

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.

robobo96

34 minutes ago

I think the value is shifting: it's moving from actually building the thing to deciding what to build: Product Engineer?

kayashaolu2

9 hours ago

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.

drsalt

7 hours ago

code jockey / code monkey

axegon_

4 hours ago

In 95% of all cases - slopper/clanker.

toomuchtodo

9 hours ago

Solutions engineer. You’re solving problems with a non deterministic natural language compiler, context in, code out.