I remember hearing about that job title in school and it was always described as a really good job for technically minded people but was never really clear what they did. And now I never hear about it as a career so I’m curious what happened.
Did it evolve something else (system architect, UX)? did it just disappear as software/tech changed? Or is it actually thriving and I’m just in a bubble?
But basically the job is living documentation. Understand how everything goes together. Clear the path for devs. Handle the talks with Product to make sure what they want to build is possible. We'd have week long UX workshops and I'd be jumping through documentation and code to note down which endpoints can handle this and what's missing. And this way, these product discussions aren't taking away maker time from the ICs.
It's a semi-management role, because people are part of the system too. It's most similar to tech lead these days.
Nowadays, anybody with math/stats aptitude will go into one of the tech related data jobs that pay way better and don’t require a long list of exams