...As do platform engineers
There was a debate a while ago over whether DevOps engineers were a thing. After all, wasn't DevOps a culture shift bringing together Devs and Ops? But then recruiters started advertising for DevOps engineers with salaries 20% higher than those for common-or-garden software engineers, and the debate was forgotten.
Now the familiar pattern is repeating, this time with platform engineers. Is a platform engineer a software developer? Certainly, but it's a role with a strong Ops strain too, focusing on the DevOps toolchain to produce a smoothly functioning, automated self-service whole from its constituent parts.
The fact this role has a new label tells us that the toolchain has become unwieldy, particularly in the realm of Kubernetes and cloud native where a continued proliferation of new tools has made it hard for Devs to take ownership of the whole development process in the original spirit of "You build it, you run it."
Indeed, in large teams the simple days of Dev and Ops coming together as one are over. Specialisations are emerging within the team including SRE, DataOps, FinOps and SecOps. Platform engineers are just the latest of those specialisations to become, if not exactly mainstream exactly, then at least a known quantity.
