Call it Software Engineering and Move On

It often seems like we’re caught in an endless cycle of redefining roles and disciplines within tech—DevOps, DevSecOps, Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, Cloud Engineering—each iteration arriving every two or three years to align with the latest trend, tool, or methodology. While these evolving titles and categories attempt to capture real changes in practice and tooling, they also tend to muddy the waters. At a certain point, you start to wonder: can’t we just call all of this Software Engineering and move on?

Take Infrastructure as Code, for example. Writing infrastructure definitions in HCL, YAML, or Python isn’t fundamentally different from writing application logic. It requires version control, testing, abstraction, and modular design. It’s code. Whether you’re provisioning cloud resources or building reusable Terraform modules, you’re solving software problems with software tools. That’s not some adjacent profession—it is software engineering.

The same goes for CI/CD pipelines. Designing robust build and deployment flows involves scripting, automation, configuration management, debugging, observability, and more. You think through failure scenarios, feedback loops, and performance—core concerns of any good software engineer. CI/CD may look like a supporting layer, but the skillset needed to build and maintain it reflects the same engineering rigor as building an app or service.

Even areas like developer platforms, site reliability, and security require deep systems thinking, programming ability, architectural planning, and continuous improvement—hallmarks of software engineering. We invent labels to isolate focus areas, but they’re often more useful for job descriptions or team boundaries than they are for describing a fundamentally different craft. All of these domains involve building systems with code, solving complex problems, and working collaboratively to improve performance, security, and user experience. So yes, it’s all software engineering. Perhaps it’s time we stop reinventing the labels and just acknowledge that the umbrella is big enough already.