The Two Jobs That Will Remain

The Two Jobs That Will Remain

I spent a while reading job descriptions and asking people what companies actually need. Not the buzzwords. The work.

My conclusion: two roles will carry the software industry. FDE, Forward Deployed Engineer. And SRE, Site Reliability Engineer.

Companies describe them in many ways. Some say solutions engineer, platform engineer, customer engineer. The names change. The core does not.

The FDE stays close to the problem. They go to where the pain is, talk to the users, see the messy reality, then build something that actually works for them. Not features for a spec nobody asked for. Value the customer can feel.

The SRE stays close to the system. They keep it running when traffic spikes, when a disk fills up at 3am, when a deploy goes wrong. They are the reason the thing stays up long enough to matter.

One faces the customer. One faces the machine. Both get measured by the same thing: did this create real value, or not?

In a time when AI writes much of the code, this is what is left for a human. Not typing functions faster. Understanding the problem, and keeping the thing alive.

I have done both kinds of work in some form. The days I felt most useful were never the days I wrote the most code. They were the days I solved a real problem for a real person, or kept a real system from falling over.

Titles will keep changing. These two will stay.