Sorry, english is not my first language, but I’m glad you pointed out my confusion about how many words are in “platform engineering.”

> DevOps was just an approach to remove the silos that some companies built between development and operations

I know this is always the intention but it is never implemented this way, it becomes a “throw crap over the wall” situation again because now you’ve made a second team and management sees that stuff as “their” job and the silos develop.

I don’t profess to know the correct way to do it, but if I was managing an IT team, I’d assign a dedicated “Ops” guy to every dev team who would occasionally also write code. I dont care what you call this person. I’m in favor of platform engineer because it’s a lot more defined than “DevOps.” People have wildly different ideas about what “senior” devops is too. With a term like platform engineer, my gauge for if a person is a senior at that role is by the quality of the platform they can deliver to me. it’s vastly better, but again, I don’t give a crap what you call it as long as organizations finally understand what they’re hiring someone to do.

I suppose I'm the guy you're talking about - I'm the lone ops guy on the one dev team for a small SaaS business. I try to write as little code as possible actually; which isn't to say I try to spend little time writing code, it's more that I try to rely on community maintained frameworks because I fear creating some complex duct-tape and zip-tie web of homebrew automation that becomes increasingly hard for myself (or god forbid another person) to maintain.

I like the term platform engineer or maybe just infrastructure engineer, but I don't think they really add much specificity. For instance, we don't use any of the big three cloud providers, which I suspect would be an expectation for most of these titles. I think the possible diversity of modern tech stacks is just too much to pin these titles down, and mostly I just tell people I'm an "IT guy" ; it's only when you talk to someone in the industry that titles like Devops or Platform Engineer have any meaning, and as this thread shows, there's not even that much consensus within.

I've had now like 6 titles in these years - infrastructure engineer, DevOps, SRE engineer, platform engineer. They always want essentially the same thing it seems like.

Technically all words are made up. And, part of the problem is industry does keep shifting the definition. Think point of article was Devs became DevOps became Support.