Latest rebranding of “sysadmin”, which became “devops engineer” or SRE a decade ago. It’s the people who shove kubernetes, datadog, and CI/CD tools into every corner.
Platform Engineers are operationally focused software engineers who focus on enablement of other software engineering groups through building self-service tooling and create unified platform for app deployment.
The cultural focus is placed on enablement of teams through self service, whereas DevOps is more about reducing silos and SRE is more about doing infra through the software engineering lens with metrics (SLO/SLA/SLI).
Elitism is alive and well in this little nook. Equating platform engineering, SRE and sysadmin to the same thing.
Platforms are often large scale distributed systems, dealing with problems like ensuring 100000s of compute nodes are in a deployed and in consistent state. Millions of lines of code are written, peer reviewed and committed to solve this problem.
This mirrors an attitude I have frequently encountered from "traditional" or "mainstream" software engineers who devalue any work that isn't features, and don't want to have to work on problems like "make my feature appear on all deployments and work well" - it's just something sysadmins do amirite?
