Ask HN: What's Up with Title Inflation, and "Software Engineers"?

2 mikewarot 2 8/29/2025, 4:29:24 PM

Why is everyone in FAANG is willing to put up with the blatant title inflation and call programmers "Software Engineers"?

Comments (2)

ben_w · 3h ago

My degree is in "software engineering", I graduated in 2006 from a Welsh university, so that isn't an example of FAANG anything.

Nor title inflation IMO, original etymology is "one who designs, constructs, or operates military works for attack or defence, etc.", and anyone who uses security components will be doing some of that given how cyberspace as a warfare domain doesn't seem to be particularly constrained these days.

bigyabai · 4h ago

Something like "software engineer" is vague enough that they can force non-programming tasks into your job description.

Post 2010 it's all been some variation on distributed systems. You can't really just "program" your way to a working K8s cluster.

Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android (9to5google.com)

Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (developers.googleblog.com)

FFmpeg 8.0 (ffmpeg.org)

What are OKLCH colors? (jakub.kr)

Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end (rosenzweig.io)

A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website (lina.sh)

Claude for Chrome (anthropic.com)

DeepSeek-v3.1 (api-docs.deepseek.com)

AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions (github.com)

Updates to Consumer Terms and Privacy Policy (anthropic.com)

Show HN: Base, an SQLite database editor for macOS (menial.co.uk)

A visual introduction to big O notation (samwho.dev)

Go is still not good (blog.habets.se)

Comet AI browser can get prompt injected from any site, drain your bank account (twitter.com)

We regret but have to temporary suspend the shipments to USA (olimex.wordpress.com)

U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel (cnbc.com)

Monodraw (monodraw.helftone.com)

Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City (cnbc.com)

Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me (boston.conman.org)

Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in past year (cnbc.com)

Michigan Supreme Court: Unrestricted phone searches violate Fourth Amendment (reclaimthenet.org)

Tesla said it didn't have key data in a fatal crash, then a hacker found it (washingtonpost.com)

Altered states of consciousness induced by breathwork accompanied by music (journals.plos.org)

Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded, now they want to silence him (electrek.co)

US Intel (stratechery.com)

Unexpected productivity boost of Rust (lubeno.dev)

Are OpenAI and Anthropic losing money on inference? (martinalderson.com)

Io_uring, kTLS and Rust for zero syscall HTTPS server (blog.habets.se)

Nx compromised: malware uses Claude code CLI to explore the filesystem (semgrep.dev)

Claude Sonnet will ship in Xcode (developer.apple.com)

How to build a coding agent (ghuntley.com)

What makes Claude Code so damn good (minusx.ai)

Framework Laptop 16 (frame.work)

Building the mouse Logitech won't make (samwilkinson.io)

Line scan camera image processing for train photography (daniel.lawrence.lu)

The Therac-25 Incident (2021) (thedailywtf.com)

Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs (cnbc.com)

The GitHub website is slow on Safari (github.com)

Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

I Am An AI Hater (anthonymoser.github.io)

Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published (github.com)

A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in (nytimes.com)

Manim: Animation engine for explanatory math videos (github.com)

Uncertain<T> (nshipster.com)

Everything I know about good API design (seangoedecke.com)

We put a coding agent in a while loop (github.com)

95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend (thedailyadda.com)

Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine (byte.tsundoku.io)

4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC (bbc.co.uk)

Ask HN: What's Up with Title Inflation, and "Software Engineers"?

Comments (2)