Having done this job once upon a time, I think the downtrend in title is inevitable. What tends to happen is that at some point in time, an organization finds

Having done this job once upon a time, I think the downtrend in title is inevitable. What tends to happen is that at some point in time, an organization finds itself in a bad place. Where pagers fire regularly, and the skills you need to manage the noise are "fast context switching", "good communication", "debugging", "ability to work insane hours". Very little of this involves coding, or building software. Teams may start by assigning some engineers into this role as an elite team, but if you come back in a couple years you'll find that the elite team has burned out or forgotten how to write software and due to the impossibility of hiring new elite team members - has resorted to hiring people to carry a pager. There are a few companies which invest in big platform orgs, but due to the lack of revenue generation - it seems that this can only be sustained with very strong leadership buy-in.