Developer Builds a Family Tree of Software Job Titles from the 1940s to Today
An experienced software practitioner, author of the blog zwischenzugs.com, has built an interactive chart of 104 IT job titles with help from the AI assistant Claude. It traces how job names in the industry have changed since the 1940s.
The author of the technology blog zwischenzugs.com, who spent several years as a "Head of DevOps", has published an interactive family tree of software job titles. He built it with the help of the AI assistant Claude, and it is available at ianmiell.github.io. The aim is to show where industry titles such as DevOps engineer, SRE (site reliability engineer) and platform engineer came from.
How the tree is built
The chart contains 104 titles, starting with "Computer" (a person who did calculations, not a machine) and ending with "AI Agent / Context Engineer". Time runs from top to bottom in five-year rows, and the titles are arranged in seven coloured columns: development; analysis, architecture and leadership; operations and infrastructure; networks and security; data and AI; quality and testing; and support and customer-facing roles.
A solid arrow means one title grew out of another, while a dashed arrow indicates influence or a common career move. The image is generated from a single Graphviz file, with descriptions kept in a JSON file. The author notes that the dates are approximate points when a title became common, and are his best estimates rather than sourced citations.
The author's observations
The author highlights six patterns. Coding was originally seen as clerical work: in 1947, Goldstine and von Neumann separated the planning of problems from coding, and much of the coding was done by women. Coding later became the hard, creative part of the job.
Some titles split and then rejoin: the webmaster role broke into front-end and back-end developers around 2005, and the two merged again as "full-stack" around 2008. Some titles are short-lived, such as "prompt engineer", which made headlines in 2023 but was soon absorbed into the AI engineer role. Names are also recycled, and new roles often echo old ones: the "forward deployed engineer" resembles IBM's systems engineers of the 1960s.
The author admits he may have missed titles or misrepresented some lineages, and invites readers to submit corrections.
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