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Comment by foobarbaz33 | Hacker News Reader

Status and titles are important to many people. Bestowing a title is a free way for companies to satisfy that itch for their employee. "Engineer" is not a formal credential or legally protected title in the USA.

All sorts of jobs have rebranded.

    Janitor -> Janitorial Engineer
    Garbage Man -> Sanitation Engineer
    Cheater -> Rules interpretation Engineer
    Guard -> Correctional Officer
    Programmer -> Software Engineer

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I actually just refer to myself as a Digital Janitor these days, even though I'm hired as SRE. Funny enough, it's met with much more understanding, and it is ironically kind of fitting as well.

I think Data Plumber really does describe what my job is most days

I'm fine with that though, honestly. Plumbing is a super valuable profession

On my more ambitious days, I still would rather be a Software Gardener than a Software Engineer though

I call myself a "Full Stack Software Janitor" since I mostly get hired to clean up and find myself cleaning up the work of other devs.

I've been thinking its less "Tech Debt" and more "Tech Sewage", as with sewage its a part of our normal day, and we just flush it down the drain hoping it never resurfaces, or at least that we won't be the one dealing with it.

LLM user -> Prompt Engineer

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