Whats the point of Software Designations

You see anybody can write code, AI, machine, humans.

So if you have done something complex, delivered something large, driven an impact - you are promoted from senior to staff, staff to senior staff or principal. (Every designation sounds a bit cringe at the moment but okay, I am going to keep calm for sake of completing this article)

But the thing is that designation is pointless in the sense - you can be called staff delivery engineer - not staff software engineer. You got promoted coz you delivered impact, maybe churned out a lot of products, which happens in most of the cases. You are good in prompting - or not even that - you have used prompts already designed by anthropic or a GitHub repos filled with agent configurations. You delivered lots of value. Hence the term delivery engineer or a more degrading term staff facilitator - which makes you feel worse. Lol.

Rather we can actually use the staff engineer for debugging or solving issues and reading a lot of code with minimal context. The more you solve, quickly you solve, you are more worthy of the word software or developer (assuming it worthy in your books)

However as context compaction optimisation, moe and agentic memory improves with models - we might see a pattern emerge where some stats will come out between a range from newb to seasoned prompters. These prompter might work in an field from software to marketing to medical. One crude way to say - more tokens, context and memory a prompter uses - the more newb they are; but the thing is that might always be the case - it might lead to a better delivery which will require less prompting with time, more modularisation or separation of concerns which can scale to 2 prompters working the same project but using very limited shared context and mostly mutually exclusive tokenisation and context.

I am having a hard time coming up with an example for medical - coz thats the space I am more interested in, other fields are more obvious.