alt Hacker NewsI did use the word "software engineer" there, but realistically what they're looking for is exactly the name of the role they wear: Member of Technical Staff. Software Engineer, businessman, product manager, designer, agentic harness engineer, cloud, devops, all rolled into one. They want people who can own the entirety of a product from end-to-end. A responsibility domain so vast that most peoples' first thought is to laugh, and that's exactly why they're acquiring companies; the responsibilities they're looking for mirror the role the founders and higher-level leadership in successful startups would have had. The lower-level engineers will probably be let go. They'll gladly pay $50M-$100M for just a dozen or so of the top people.
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The candidate you're describing is a unicorn. Even assuming that this acqui-hire routine is a good way of finding such people, that doesn't answer the question why they're needed for "some dumb integration to make Hubspot data available in Claude, or something equally as boring" (as you suggested above).
I think you're overestimating the rationality of this game.
> I did use the word "software engineer" there
The reason why I avoided this term is that in Germany, there exists a quite strict of whatx an engineer (Ingenieur) is, which is defined in the laws of many federal states (Ingenieurgesetz [engineering law]). "Ingenieur" (engineer) is a protected professional title:
> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ingenieur&oldid=2... (*)
Falsely claiming that you are an Ingenieur when you aren't (by the definition in the Ingenieurgesetz) is a punishable crime in Germany:
> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Missbrauch_von_Ti...
There exist some boundary cases under which as a software developer you can call yourself an "Ingenieur", but you have to be insanely careful about whether you actually satisfy the legal criteria (see (*)) - in most cases you don't and you are thus a criminal if you do.