Blog
What each discipline covers
Every posting on soften.dev sits in exactly one discipline, and there are fourteen of them. They are not simply the source board's categories: a posting's discipline is decided here, from what the posting is called, because an aggregator passes each board's own taxonomy through unchanged and a tech-only board that inherits somebody else's idea of "IT" stops being tech-only quietly. Where a title matches none of the rules, the source's own category is the last thing consulted rather than the first. That mechanism is the previous post.
Below is the full set, grouped only to make it readable — the board keeps one flat list. The discipline index shows the ones with something open today, with a count against each; a hub that is empty for the moment still has a page, it just has nothing to show yet.
Building the software
- Backend — server-side application work: services and APIs, the code behind them, and the databases they talk to. The broadest of the fourteen, and where a posting that says "developer" without saying anything else lands.
- Frontend — what runs in the browser. Interface code, the frameworks it is built with, and the markup and styling underneath it.
- Full-stack — roles the employer has deliberately written as both halves at once, rather than one half with the other mentioned in passing.
- Mobile — applications for phones and tablets, native or cross-platform, including the release and store side of shipping one.
Running it in production
- DevOps & SRE — deployment, infrastructure, pipelines, containers and the reliability of what is already live. Cloud-platform engineering belongs here rather than under systems administration.
- IT Support & SysAdmin — keeping an organization's own machines, networks and accounts working: helpdesk, systems and network administration, internal IT.
- Security — information security across the board: defensive and operational security work, penetration testing, and security audit and compliance roles.
Working with the data
- Data & Analytics — analysis and reporting, business intelligence, dashboards, and the pipelines and warehouses that feed them.
- Data Science & ML — modelling rather than reporting: machine learning, data science, and the engineering around getting a model into production.
Shipping and quality
- QA & Testing — quality assurance in both forms, manual and automated, including test engineering and the tooling it runs on.
- Product & Project Management — deciding what gets built and running the work that builds it: product management, project and delivery management, business analysis on a technical product.
- Engineering Management — leading the people who build it. Team and engineering leads, heads of engineering, and technical leadership roles where the job is the team rather than the code.
The interface itself
- Design & UX — product and interface design: UX and UI work, research, and the design side of what a user actually touches. Design roles with no product attached are not technology roles and are not on this board at all.
Everything else technical
- Other Tech — two things at once. It is where enterprise-platform work goes — SAP, ERP, Oracle, 1C, Salesforce, SharePoint and the like, which are their own careers rather than a flavour of backend — and it is the fallback for a genuine technology role whose title matches none of the thirteen above. A role landing here means the title was unusual, not that the role is marginal.
A discipline is a filter, not a promise: which of these has open roles changes with every ingest run. The full listing can be narrowed by discipline, city, seniority, employment type and remote status at once, and the daily email carries whatever is new.