Ian Miell publishes family tree of 104 software job titles from 1940s coding to AI agent role

Ian Miell, a former Head of DevOps, published an interactive family tree mapping 104 software job titles from the 1940s to a c. 2025 AI Agent / Context Engineer role. The chart places titles in seven families: Development Analysis, architecture and leadership; Operations and infrastructure; Networks and security; Data and AI; Quality and test; Support and customer-facing. Time runs top to bottom in five-year rows. Solid arrows show lineage; dashed arrows show influence or common career moves. The site is built from one Graphviz file and one JSON file.

The evidence is the dataset itself: 104 nodes, each tied to a family, a five-year period, and parent links. Known anchors include SRE at Google in 2003, DevOps coined in 2009, and Data Scientist in 2008. The tree also records the 1947 split between planning and coding, and the webmaster role around 1993, which later fragmented into web development, sysadmin, editing, and design. Miell states the dates are when titles became common, not first recorded use, and are estimates, not sourced citations.

The tree supports a labor-market pattern: titles are not stable occupational categories but packaging for work that shifts with tooling and organizational control. Coding began as clerical translation of mathematical plans and was associated with lower status; it later became central professional identity. Webmastering centralized many duties, then dispersed into specialized roles before full-stack recombined front-end and back-end. Prompt engineer appears in 2023 and is shown absorbed into AI engineer as model capability improves, while scrum master demand peaked in the 2010s before folding into management or delivery roles.

The stakes sit in hiring, compensation, and career mobility. Job titles sort labor markets: they signal required skills, salary bands, and who is considered senior. The source notes prompt engineer listings drew high pay in 2023 before the skill was absorbed into AI engineer roles. The newest entry, AI Agent / Context Engineer, is dated around 2025 and its description says time will tell whether it stays separate. The tree documents that instability.