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Greg Tombs's avatar

Truly enjoyed this one. Curious if this all centers around X-“engineer”; probably more often than not in the short term, with differentiation required in the long term. Interesting stuff.

Tom Hollands's avatar

Thanks for the kind words!

Fergus O'Brien's avatar

This is great

Arham Wani's avatar

This idea is also the reason Elon names different teams or differnet roles in his companies the way he does.

Bilgin Ibryam's avatar

This reminds me of how infrastructure engineers became DevOps engineers and then platform engineers.

Chris Chambers's avatar

This makes so much sense. Part of the evolution of the hybrid model will be rebranding and repacking roles that reflect that rapid lot changing nature of work. I suspect eventually this will even reach back into academia as well with entirely new majors reflecting these hybrid skills and titles as well.

The Long Game ♟️'s avatar

Enjoyed this piece!

Identity shaping: people act to match the label. Call someone an “owner”, and they start protecting outcomes, not just shipping tasks.

Legitimacy + power routing: it tells the org where authority should sit when reality gets messy, closer to the customer and the fight.

Liam Weight's avatar

The semiconductor has had this role for a long time, in the form of "Field Application Engineers". I am one myself, and spend 50% of my week at customer sites or on calls/messaging them, solving engineering challenges. It's interesting to see whether this nomenclature makes its way over to the industry.

sheo ratan Agarwal's avatar

“It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles.” - Niccolo Machiavelli

“title arbitrage”—Two MODELBUSTER

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