As a thought experiment, you have a food chain in which you have producers and consumers of which there are several layers. If you applied this to the software ecosystem but inverse the rules, who are the most elite or apex of programmers producing or being adept with technology? I am not meaning in terms of FAANG or working at a prestigious company, I am meaning in terms of niche skill. i.e. is a driver developer higher up the food chain than a game developer? Is an embedded software engineer higher up the food chain than a Java backend engineer? Who is at the top? This is a rough idea how I see it (ascending order) 1. Wordpress / CMS developers 2. UI Developers 3. Web Frontend developers 4. Data engineers (ETL) 5. Web Backend engineers 6. Networking engineers (Layer 3-4) 7. Embedded systems / automation / PLC engineers 8. OS engineers 9. Game developers (UI / tooling) 10. Game developers (networking / logic / AI) 11. Driver / Electrical engineering 12. Cryptographic engineers 13. ??? TC (£90k)
Animals at the top of food chain tend to be consumers than producers. I am not sure why you would want to inverse the rules. But specialization tend to be limiting. Technology in this industry is really not that hard. Most of the complexity came from ambiguity within the real world.
Thats why I inversed it, because someone who is a driver engineer is a producer but is more important than a Node.js developer.
Good luck with your web apps if people developing OS/embedded/driver stuff suddenly dissappear (how would the Internet even work without network devices? Where would your apps execute on? Etc.). OP made the right call
apex: no code devs
This is an excellent post, have always wondered about the answer myself.
But I might place OS engineers > Game Developers. I'm nether so I'm not sure.
The only game developers that are maybe above OS devs are the mythical Graphics/Rendering Engineers.
The list is quite good apart from OS devs being below game devs (only graphics/rendering are above OS devs). Also I'd break embedded into two groups, realtime and non-RT. Non RT are below networking. You are missing HPC devs that work on compute simulations of physics, biology, genomics etc. Should be top 3. I'd also add compiler developers in the top 5 maybe?
Needs a spot for mobile devs, otherwise lgtm
Apex engineers are probably the product engineers, who make products that produce revenue? Like they consume the work of other engineers
Yea...the op miss the point that it is neither difficult to replace people specializing in foundational tech, nor useful to have them unless someone use their work to generate revenue. It is a fairly common misconception among new college grads I mentor.
Slaves arguing who can row the boat faster. 😂
Apex in a company is closest to revenue and most downstream. Lowest would be contractors or any engineering not considered a core competency.
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That’s how it is in every high paying industry.
We make enough money to have no economic problems, with low effort. Makes sense we'd waste time into random contests