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Ask HN: What job titles or roles didn't exist 10 years ago?

6 points by vanilla-almond ↗ HN
Technology never stops marching on. What are some job titles or departments that didn't exist 10 years ago? Or what roles existed 10 years ago but were not widely known but are now mainstream?

Two examples:

YouTuber

Some people were probably making a full-time income from YouTube 10 years ago, but the role "YouTuber" is much more mainstream and well-known today. Plus, thousands (millions?) of people are now full-time YouTubers covering every interest under the sun.

Social Media roles

I saw the following job title recently: Head of Brand Engagement and Social Media - which made me wonder if titles liked this existed 10 years ago? Or are they only now mainstream and more common?

Note: Although I have listed technology-related roles, are there new roles from the past 10 years not principally about technology?

16 comments

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rdtwo
Director of diversity and inclusion
byoung2
Driverless Car Engineer

Telehealth Nurse and Doctor

Cryptocurrency investor

qwertyuiop_
Vice President Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives
Graffur
These are guesses:

Sales Engineer, Developer Advocate, DevOps Engineer, React Developer

vanilla-almond
Developer Advocate

I also wondered about this one and wasn't sure if it existed before under a different title e.g. Developer Relations or the more recent (horrible-sounding) Developer Evangelist

dane-pgp
> thousands (millions?) of people are now full-time YouTubers

I would guess not millions. All the relevant numbers are confidential, but estimates seem to suggest that having a million subscribers[0] is probably the level at which you could comfortably make it a full-time job, and there are maybe roughly 20,000 YouTubers with that many subscribers[1].

Bear in mind, YouTube is a global platform, so that number has to be spread across multiple countries. Therefore, other than maybe the US, I'd expect that no country has more than 1000 people whose job is full-time YouTuber. Also, for comparison, Lego has about 20,000 employees worldwide.[2]

[0] https://contentcareer.com/blog/average-salary-of-a-youtuber-...

[1] https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/how-many-youtube-chann...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/292314/number-of-employe...

gfd
> I'd expect that no country has more than 1000 people whose job is full-time YouTuber

There are probably more than 1000 full time youtubers in japan. I watch vtubers and just hololive and nijisanji alone employ over a hundred streamers. Most of them make enough for it to be a fulltime job, you can find some of their donation earnings on sites like: https://playboard.co/en/youtube-ranking/most-superchatted-al...

muzani
Patreon would be interesting to compare to. The stats are vague too, but apparently 200k have at least one patron: https://graphtreon.com/patreon-stats

That's a little lower than I expected. I suspect people make a living from Patreon sooner than they would off YouTube, so your math seems to click.

vanilla-almond
Interesting figures, thanks for sharing.

The popular coding channel Coder Coder has currently 300,000 subscribers, but 9 months ago the channel host announced they had quit their job to focus mainly on YouTube. It's not quite YouTube full-time but I suspect the combination of: YouTube + sponsorship + freelance work makes up a full-time income. I can imagine that combination works well even with channels with 100,000+ subscribers.

Coder Coder: Life/channel update

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdkzB13xjL0

tata71
Anything related to scrum, agile
muzani
I suspect scrum has been mainstream longer, and actually only recently began to lose popularity, now that it's obsoleted by tools. Scrum master probably made more sense back when engineers would be locked in their offices. A few decades ago, you'd have emails and notifications, and a few years ago, you could get live updates of what everyone is working on
muzani
Social media marketing has gone from niche to completely mainstream. Today, if you have "marketing" in your title, you're expected to be able to do it digitally too.