104 job titles across 80 years: an interactive family tree of software roles from 'Computer' to 'Context Engineer'
bibryam · x · 2026-11-15
- Blogger imiell (former Head of DevOps) built, with Claude's help, a family tree of software industry job titles spanning the 1940s to the 2020s: 104 titles, from 'Computer' (a person, not a machine) at the top down to 'AI Agent / Context Engineer'.
- The chart is organized into seven colored family columns — Development; Analysis, Architecture & Leadership; Operations & Infrastructure; Networks & Security; Data & AI; Quality & Test; Support & Customer-Facing. Solid arrows mean a title grew out of its parent; dashed arrows indicate influence or common career moves. Milestone titles like SRE (Google, 2003) and DevOps (coined 2009) are bolded.
- The whole thing is a single Graphviz .dot file plus a JSON file of descriptions — one line per title, rendered with dot -Tsvg, and adding a title takes three small edits.
- His core observation: in 1947 coding was considered the clerical part of computing, with planning as the real intellectual work. Eighty years later, AI is reviving a strikingly similar argument, while job titles keep cycling around the same underlying work.
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