Software engineers are now product engineers
Writing code is cheaper than it used to be. Framing the problem, cutting scope, and owning the outcome is the hard part.
My CV still says engineer. A lot of the work looks like product work now: name the problem, cut the scope, decide how you will know it worked, then build.
Agents sped that up. When writing code is cheaper, the bottleneck moves earlier. Problem framing. Data quality. Taste. Teams that only count tickets closed get a lot of tickets and not much product.
That does not mean every engineer should become a PM. It means the job includes writing a small honest spec, killing decorative features, and caring about what happens after merge.
I still care about latency, schemas, and failure modes. Those show up as infrastructure work, but they are product questions. A fast API that answers the wrong question is still wrong.
If you are early in your career: practice explaining tradeoffs in plain language. Build things end to end. Treat “it works on my machine” as the start of the story, not the end.