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The Insanity of Being a Software Engineer

• abxyz 2y ago
  > Being a software engineer is tough. No, it isn't. Software engineering is one of the easiest careers. We are so coddled that we think what is described in this post is tough, that alone is evidence of how not tough our career is.
  • chrsw 2y ago
    I've had quite a few jobs. I've been a computer engineer now I'm a software engineer. These are the only jobs I've had where I felt I could be fired for performance.
  • smackeyacky 2y ago
    Exactly. Tell a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, fast food employee how hard your software job is.
    • sarchertech 2y ago
      Truck driver is a special kind of hell because of the time away from home. But if it paid well enough and had better job security, I’d much rather be building houses all day. I worked in retail for a while and made it to supervisor. It was much easier than being a software engineer, the pay was just crappy. Software engineering is definitely up there in terms of mentally demanding jobs, it just pays well.
      • JKCalhoun 2y ago
        Both construction and mowing lawns are two jobs I can say felt much more rewarding than programming. Each day you walked away with a sense of having "built" something (or, er, tidied up in the case of mowing lawns). And accomplishing anything with your hands and manual labor is instantly gratifying.
        • threatofrain 2y ago
          There are a lot of programming jobs where people never get to build anything, only fix things that other people didn't do well enough. Many people have never seen greenfield. Other people work jobs where they're pumping out new creative works. So when people talk about how spiritually satisfying programming is we're gonna hear this discordance.
        • m000 1y ago
          > And accomplishing anything with your hands and manual labor is instantly gratifying. May I add that Agile (which appears to be the currently prevalent work methodology in SE) takes away much of the gratification of software engineering?
    • stefanos82 2y ago
      I think it's an unfair comparison here. A developer, programmer, software engineer, call this category of work however you like, it uses the brain at such relentless limits, implicitly or explicitly depending on the problem a person it's currently working on, it takes an incredible amount of effort to relax your mind at the end of the day. I remember working on a very difficult project for a customer and I would sleep for 4-5 hours per day until I deliver it, and by the end of the project I was so exhausted that I had to take a whole week to cool down my brain and relax my body. It took me a whole month to fully recover! I have worked as a construction worker with my father and I know how to grow my own fruits and veggies; I know the struggles with those things...but trust me, you cannot compare the two by any means! Using your body exclusively it can be tiring indeed, but at the end of the day, you will have a nice shower, eat and rest well, and the next day you will be good to go; whereas with using your mind exclusively can be so dangerous in so many ways! At least, that's my case.
      • deleted 2y ago
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      • rsynnott 2y ago
        > I remember working on a very difficult project for a customer and I would sleep for 4-5 hours per day until I deliver it That’s not normal or typical.
        • stefanos82 2y ago
          It's actually quite common and typical for freelancers. Unfortunately when you evaluate a project, initially everything looks and feel just right, that you wouldn't have any problem delivering the end result as soon as possible. But..! We know how customers ask for small "favors" of "tiny" changes that won't affect the whole project, or so they think(!), which eventually end up delaying the whole development as they become painful hurdles, only to find yourself struggling to deliver the project so you can get paid in time. Those who know this nightmare, know!
          • nradov 2y ago
    • rini17 2y ago
      Not easy either but they have less of "the reward for work done is more work more learning".
    • JKCalhoun 2y ago
      Actually when I was gutting salmon in Alaska, making pizzas at Godfather's, mowing lawns, working as dishwasher in the dorms to pay tuition ... these all were much less stressful jobs that I look back on almost fondly. (Well, maybe not the cannery.)
    • threatofrain 2y ago
      Winning in software is as easy as winning in chess. Often times you're making ripples with just the flick of a wrist. You make a few clicks and suddenly you're matched against someone from across the world. Other times you're just staring at the monitor, looking intently but doing nothing. Even children could make it to the top of the world in this activity of intense sitting.
    • 9rx 2y ago
      I work in software, farm, and in a restaurant (albeit not fast food). They are all easy and hard in their own dimensions.
    • whateveracct 1y ago
      I guess the argument could be... They can't do my job. I won't do theirs.
    • iLemming 1y ago
      I think you're conflating job satisfaction and the difficulty of doing it. Software engineering can bring immense joy, but it is often a hard job to do. While it may not be physically demanding like some trades, it is often intellectually demanding and stressful, especially with tight deadlines and evolving technologies. You know that intellectual tasks, such as those found in software engineering, can require significant mental effort and may burn more calories than some physical jobs due to constant cognitive engagement and stress?
    • Ferret7446 1y ago
      How about this: tell a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, fast food employee: software engineering is so easy, you should go do it. Clearly, being a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, fast food employee is easier for them, and software engineering is harder, otherwise they would have switched to the easier and better paying job.
  • dharmab 2y ago
    I was talking with friends at a party last night about their white collar jobs, and yeah, SWE was the easiest and cushiest job in the room by a mile. One friend had just finished a 3 month program to certify to fly a certain type of airliner. They probably had more intense study and testing in 3 months than most people do in a 4 year undergraduate program, SWE included.
    • saurik 2y ago
      > I was talking with friends at a party last night about their white collar jobs, .... One friend had just finished a 3 month program to certify to fly a certain type of airliner. An airline pilot is "grey collar". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-collar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-collar https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/02/01/gray-collar-jobs-offer-the-best-of-both-white-and-blue-collar-opportunities/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/02/01/gray-colla...
      • dharmab 2y ago
        I don't think anyone in that room would have agreed with that term.
        • trallnag 2y ago
          Why?
          • dharmab 2y ago
            Frankly, trying to claim their jobs, which all require more education and have much higher pressure and consequences for error than mine, aren't white collar would have been rude and insulting to everyone.
            • goda90 2y ago
              Did you read the Wikipedia article? Grey collar is work that takes both intellectual and physical skill. It even includes surgery as grey collar. Thinking white collar indicates more education and pressure is the issue. There's white collar jobs that can be done by high school graduates, and blue collar jobs where life and death are literally a split second away most of the time.
  • NL807 2y ago
    Easiest careers, but also the hardest job to keep things from becoming an ungodly mess.
    • dharmab 2y ago
      I used to work in a hospital. Software ain't bad at all, haha.
    • Ekaros 2y ago
      At least software engineers can do something to not make a mess or change it. Once you get to real physical world that might not even be realistically done...
  • grahar64 2y ago
    I think most jobs are hard, but "grass is always greener" means we focus on what is hard in our job and easy in other jobs.
  • batty_alex 2y ago
    I don't agree at all that it's the easiest of careers. I never had to work free overtime as a postal clerk until 1AM because of a production bug in deployment I never had to figure out how to fix a fry machine on-the-spot at McDonald's because the person who normally fixes it is on vacation in the mountains I also never had to learn brand new ways of driving cars every few months as a valet driver. Maybe your software engineering job is easy but, this is the most stressful job I've had. And i'm not your average HN'er that's only ever known being a code slinger
    • MrJohz 2y ago
      That does not sound like normal work for a software engineer. That sounds more like you have found an unusually bad workplace. Why are you changing out tools every few months? Why are you working overtime for free? Why is there only one person who knows how to fix things when they break (especially if that happens so regularly that you have one person who "normally" fixes it)?
      • dharmab 2y ago
        The other two are dysfunctional but in the US, SWE are pretty much universally classified as exempt and legally aren't entitled to overtime pay. I see from your bio that you are based in a country with much better worker rights than the US.
        • MrJohz 2y ago
          Ah, if that's the case I can understand the argument a bit better, but maybe the article should then be titled "the insanity of being in one of the best-paid professions in one of the richest countries in the world, and still having poor working conditions".
      • tayo42 2y ago
        > Why are you working overtime for free? Thats what oncall is, every job ive seen makes you do it
  • everdrive 2y ago
    I agree completely, but I always struggle with how to characterize this. Software engineers are generally pretty privileged, and even relatively mediocre ones can pretty easily break $100k per year. But, work in this field is incredibly unsatisfying and frustrating. For sure, none of us would drop what we're doing to go work in retail. It's not as if we're suffering in any strict sense; no one is really allowed to abuse us, our jobs aren't ruining our bodies compared to something like construction. But, many of us kind of hate it and only stay because of the money, and would work anywhere else if the other jobs paid well enough. Now before you get out your tiny violin, I'm not saying other people don't have it worse, or that anyone should direct their sympathy towards us at all. I guess it feels more like a golden handcuffs situation.
    • martinsnow 2y ago
      In America. If you work in other markets the salary is much lower. The only engineers I know who make above 100k euro are either lead or founder level.
      • OJFord 2y ago
        100k USD is about 90k EUR (and 77k GBP), which you may say doesn't change your point materially, but I'm not splitting hairs, that's more than a 10% difference. I think people often put the goalposts further away than they truly are by comparing numbers cross-currency directly like this or just round numbers in general.
        • dharmab 2y ago
          FWIW that 10% almost entirely comes from the current economic shock. At the beginning of 2025 1 USD was about 1 Euro.
      • dfawcus 1y ago
        It is possibly to earn over £100k as a software engineer employee in the UK, however those tend to be very specialised fields. (Not all of them are finance related). I do recall a software manager (OK apples to oranges) grumbling about 10 years ago about him exceeding that level, and having to play games to avoid being bit by the tax impact which cuts in between £100k and £125k. That said, I do know engineers who indicate they earn in excess of £100k, and they're not lead nor founder level - just experienced in the appropriate area.
  • filoleg 2y ago
    Agreed. We don’t even need to reach for the apples to oranges comparisons with manual labor jobs, just gotta look at anyone working another highly paid white collar job. Compare working in big law to big tech, and it will be plain as day. And I am not even getting into the baseline requirements to get there (undergrad from a good school with great GPA, LSAT, a top law school that is gonna cost you a pretty penny, hustling for internships, BAR, etc.), which SWE as a career has pretty much none of. The overall work-life balance difference alone is crazy.
    • FirmwareBurner 2y ago
      >Compare working in big law to big tech Not everyone works in big tech. A lot of devs worldwide work in mom and pop shops, legacy businesses, or various consultancy/body shops. Big-tech workers are the exception, not the rule, except maybe for the US workers.
      • filoleg 2y ago
        That’s a fair point, but I am not sure how it is relevant, unless devs at mom&pop shops/legacy businesses/etc. and those outside of the US work more than the US lawyers (or any other highly-paid white collar job) or have barriers to entry similar to those. From those I know working at those places (and from working at a legacy business myself at one point, a big bank), that didn’t seem to be the case at all. At startups, sure, but that’s just a high risk/high reward type of a deal, and they still don’t have almost any barriers to entry either. Is it the case outside of the US? Genuine question, because I am not super familiar with close reality dev jobs outside of the US. But from what I saw, it didn’t strike me as an obvious thing that they get ground to the bone or have high barriers to entry (as opposed to other highly-paid white collar jobs).
        • lucyjojo 2y ago
          most devs are not highly paid outside the USA. they're good jobs for sure, pay-wise it would be around plumber range? no high barrier to entry whether you're worked to the bone or not depends on the place but yeah, in general devs have nothing to complain about.
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  • tiberriver256 2y ago
    Thank you. If I complained for one second about my short houred, high paying, long vacationing, low-education requiring job around any of my family I'd get laughed out of the house.
  • trchek 2y ago
    I gotta say I worked as a farmhand, waiter, fast food manager, line cook, grounds crew (by far my favorite job, it was at a university and I got to do everything), plumber, electrician, day laborer, delivery driver for many things and I did a couple stints in factories all before I ever owned a computer (didn’t come from a background where you had one, I got my first one and it clicked, within a year, I was working at an ISP configuring Qmail and Bind, everyone just assuming I had been living with a computer since I was born). I’ve had a wildly successful career in tech where I’ve gotten to do, what to me are crazy impressive things (I don’t want to brag about here but you may have benefited from some of it, certainly all of you have done more impressive things than me, and thank you for that) and I don’t regret it a day, but as someone that’s worked in those " normal jobs", other than factory work I found the jobs themselves WILDLY more satisfying than anything I’m doing today. Tech work did used to be a lot better and I still love learning new things but if I could make a few hundred grand a year and never do another OKR and garden I would take that so quickly you can’t even imagine (actually I’d take it for a 100 grand year). Now I’m old and I have people that depend on me, so I do the OKR shuffle and play all the politics, and even lead on new tech that I think is being misapplied in the org but hell if I can get anyone to believe me and just use SQLite. But if I was single and had no kids, I’d gladly give up the 6 figure lifestyle to get my hands in the dirt again or even get through a hard rush in the kitchen with the team, there was so much more worthwhile about the jobs I had before, it was just the benefits sucked and couldn’t support a family in the USA without a lot of luck and sacrifice. I think maybe it is possible that most of you that think these other jobs are so hard just didn’t come from a family where they were normal, but for me they were, and I don’t see anything wrong with them other than the pay and the benefits. They’re honest work. That said I’d be ok if technology companies just let us do our jobs without all the bizarre AMA, self help talk and bizarre behavior from management.
    • test6554 1y ago
      For me work is work. Getting up on Monday Morning is always going to be a bummer. So I might as well get PAID and air conditioning.
    • sshine 2y ago
      How inspiring. As someone who only delivered newspapers and worked in a video store as a kid, before landing my first developer job, I’ve always had this impression. And I could never convince myself to go work on a farm, or in a nursery, or at a gas station, because working on my computer, often from home, always paid better. I feel like most computer problems are made up, and so many real-world problems draw in your emotions and senses.
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  • OutOfHere 2y ago
    That's not true at all because an eight hour shift of real coding work easily wears out the brain, making the entire evening useless. It is a sedentary job requiring excessive caffeine, with the result being that health deteriorates slowly but surely due to the job.
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  • Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
    I think there is something to be said to how many people dislike doing what we do as software engineers. Forget about the people who like this job, there are so many looking at me sideways every time I describe what I do. True that the other jobs are usually treated very poorly, though.
  • purple-leafy 2y ago
    Wrong. It is tough. But most jobs are tough - in some way. Software Engineering is one of the most information-volatile industries in history that I can think of. You have to aggressively keep pace with potentially, and I’m guessing here, the fastest shifting industry in history in terms of practices and knowledge and improvements. Not only that, it is constant failure and obstacles - bugs, frameworks, features, platforms, what have you - and constant layers of abstraction. A lot of the time you cannot visualise any outputs. Software Engineering is a highly skilled industry, and probably the most competitive industry in the world, with a very high rate of uncertainty and layoffs and change. We are working with some of the most complex systems created by man in history. I don’t think you can make a broad generalisation that we are coddled lol. Software Engineers in the USA in certain population centres earn a large salary, sure, but look overseas and comparatively that is not the case. Seriously, by what metric is Software Engineering one of the easiest careers? I’d like to hear your viewpoint because I think it’s so off-base that I must be missing something. It has its definite perks like work from home. But Software is up there as one of the toughest knowledge-worker industries there is. There are much tougher careers like anything Electrical Engineering, but by no yardstick is Software easy
    • 9rx 1y ago
      > and probably the most competitive industry in the world It may be fair to say that it wants to work its way towards that as the industry matures, but that hasn't been the case. People have been able to make insane amounts of money in software. You cannot make money in a competitive industry.
    • Ferret7446 1y ago
      Indeed, GP's hypothesis can be trivially challenged by asking "If it's so easy, why isn't everyone doing it?"
      • try_the_bass 1y ago
        I mean, everyone's trying. I've noticed a marked increase in the number of people in software engineering who are there first and foremost for the paycheck. Some of them don't even like writing software! This doesn't necessarily correlate to skill at writing software, but I've also encountered a higher ratio of poor performers from this growing demographic, as well. The end result is that the median skill level seems to go down over time. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, and seems like it should be expected as the pool of people working in software development grows. But as time goes on, there are definitely more and more people who are trying (and succeeding!) at doing it.
  • atoav 2y ago
    Being a software engineer is a piece of cake compared to other engineering disciplines. Sure wrangling complexity and a shitton of knowledge is a lot of work, but most other engineering disciplines have much higher stakes, require you to put yourself out there and can land you in jail if you don't do your craft as you should. Have you ever heard of a modern software engineer who landed in jail because their error was part of an incident thst costed others their lives? Typically software errors are shrugged away as if they are extreme wheather events thst nobody can change. Creating usable elegant, efficient, reliable, testable and maintainable software isn't trivial, but it is doable and the consequences to not getting it 100% right are usually comparably mild. If I fuck up a part of code I usually produce a crash, patch it and I am good to go, if I select the wrong cables and put them into a building, I either cause a fire or I have to tear the whole building open to replace them, and let's not talk about civil engineering.. I remember sitting in a class of 30 people where people had over 30 different solutions to a complex load calculation of the kind that could kill people if it was realized.
  • mpalmer 2y ago
    Quite a pronouncement to make with no supporting detail. Reads like troll bait if I'm being honest. But I'll respond in kind: Yes, it is. Tough is relative. There is no "we" to be coddled, only your flawed perception of a difficult-to-grasp, heterogeneous whole. There is no "we" to form a single impression of what is described in the post. Rhetoric isn't evidence.
  • dughnut 1y ago
    A bridge engineer would need to know how to design a structure based on first principles of physics, nationally recognized reference documents, state agency published standards, state agency unpublished standards, agency project manager preferences, internal management preferences, and do so within a complicated project delivery protocol. These don’t all agree. Oh, and you can be sued and lose license to practice if you’re wrong. A doctor can’t give you aspirin without 2+ layers of administration to do the medical coding. I can only guess what bullshit liability insurance and licensure entails. Knowledge work is usually paid because it isn’t trivial.
  • iLemming 1y ago
    How old are you? You get to your forties as a software engineer, and you'd realize how taxing this occupation is. Your eyesight may deteriorate; your neck and spine may experience chronic pain; you could develop digestive and kidney problems from prolonged immobility; you might get hemorrhoids and carpal tunnel syndrome; your immune system could weaken from constant stress and may cause depression. The number of different "solutions" for solving ergonomics alone is evidence of how difficult a career as a software engineer is, both - mentally and physically.
    • PhunkyPhil 1y ago
      Realistically, do you not think most of these things are largely solvable by a few, intentional changes to your daily routine? 30 minute walk before work, gym after work, outdoor/physical hobbies, intentional healthy eating, etc... These, to me, aren't difficult and end up providing a net benefit on your life far outweighing the effort required to implement them.
      • iLemming 1y ago
        Realistically, 30 minutes of walking a day is not enough to offset the long hours of sitting (no matter how great the chair is); standing desks aren't necessarily a better solution here either. Gym and healthy eating are a must, but not everyone can afford them (in terms of time). Anyhow, unlike my non-programmer friends, I can never leave my work - whenever I'm walking my dog, working out, cooking dinner, or taking a shower - I still keep thinking about the things I need to solve, the failing tests, the PR comments, my open-source projects, etc. Yes, I still love my job and wouldn't trade it for anything else. Sure, I'm very happy that I don't have to leave the house at 2AM to risk my life, but still, it isn't really one of "the easiest careers" - I am easily disposable, I don't ever receive a pension, whenever I need to find another gig - I have to go through seven circles of hell, and it never is the same hell to go through, I have too many bosses, I constantly have to keep learning new skills, routinely prove my worth, and defend my opinions, because even after twenty years of building expertise in various areas, in our field of work, one can never confidently call themselves an expert.
  • grafmax 1y ago
    “Appreciate how good you have it” doesn’t help the exploited be any less exploited. Instead it serves to nudge the comparatively-less-exploited to feel guilty enough to stay quiet.
  • Supermancho 1y ago
    > No it isnt. Yes it is. I can name a number of careers that are easier. Start with accounting or tax prep or mechanic or welder or barber or nail salon anything, on and on. Ridiculous.
  • coldtea 1y ago
    >We are so coddled that we think what is described in this post is tough Just because the stress is mental and not physical, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Ever heard of burnout?
  • subjectsigma 1y ago
    It irks me to no end how much software engineers love to self-flagellate. If I had never met a software engineer before and just read HN my takeaway would be that all software engineers are privileged assholes who live in a bubble, get paid way too much, on top of that cheat on their hours, and provide functionally no value to society. In real life this is obviously not true. Especially love the classic “Well, that’s not normal, only what I am familiar with is normal, because everybody thinks like me”-flavored responses. Obviously it’s not normal to work overtime or crunch because I’ve never done it. (Just ignore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crunch_(video_games) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crunch_(video_games) and go back to shittalking SWE.)
    • subjectsigma 1y ago
      This “debate” has come up a few times in the streaming community. Viewer: “Streaming is so easy, you’re basically not even working, streamers are so privileged.” Streamer: “Can you act?” Viewer: “No, but what -“ Streamer: “Ok so you can’t act. Have you ever tried acting out a play, but it’s 6 hours long and also hundreds of people get to shout obscenities at you, and also you’re sometimes obligated to respond to their disturbing comments completely ad-lib without breaking character, and also you have to be juggling at the same time?” Viewer: “… well I still think <INSERT JOB> is harder” It doesn’t take a genius to realize there a different dimensions of difficulty and yet somehow many people can’t
• grahar64 2y ago
  Specialization hasn't occurred because everything keeps changing and specialists become either stagnant, bored or unemployable. The size of a brick was standardized in 1840, then 1970 for metric. Let's get that kind of stability in software before we start specializing
  • _fat_santa 1y ago
    I think specialization still occurs in our field but it’s more domain driven than tech driven. I know folks that have built their careers in banking, auth, crypto, billing and healthcare. In each of those cases your language will differ but there are always similarities in that domain.
• ginko 2y ago
  This should be called "The Insanity of Being a Web Developer". You can be an SE without ever touching JS.
  • sebtron 2y ago
    I noticed that for web developers "developers" is a synonym of "web developer". Being a non-web developer, I find this at the same time mildly amusing and offensive.
    • BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
      This, some people recently forwarded a "tech pay" survey to all dev teams (ours does C++/Qt desktop software), and there was only (basically) "Frontend dev", "Backend dev" and "AI/ML dev" in the job list. It reminded me of that KotH skit "- So, are you Chinese or Japanese? - Huh, I come from Laos and... - Chinese, or Japanese?".
      • bitwize 2y ago
        Crooter: "So tell me about your work at XXX Robotics. Was it more front-end or back-end?" Me: "It was robot control software. It controlled a robot. Also I did some UI work, based on the same framework as the control software itself." Crooter: "Ah-huh, and which database did you use? Oracle? MySQL?"
    • Xenoamorphous 2y ago
      I feel the opposite. Sometimes I feel non-web developers don’t consider web devs as “real devs”, esp. the frontend ones.
    • chrsw 2y ago
      This is an extremely mild version of what it feels like to be a minority. Web developers are the most common type of developer. It is simply natural for them to equate "developers" and "software developers". Out of sight, out of mind. It's not a hostile thing, it's not something people necessarily want to do. But it still happens. It's a human thing.
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• gundamdoubleO 2y ago
  Learning a couple of programming languages and frameworks you maybe don't like conceptually is more what I would describe as "mildly annoying" rather than tough.
• stefanos82 2y ago
  I really liked your article; it expresses more or less my own personal concerns around technology. I am certain that whenever the opportunity arises to change my professional direction, I will do it immediately. To me personally, as a profession, technology is not worth it anymore; it has lost its meaning. I just use it as my leisure, nothing more.
• JKCalhoun 2y ago
  I'm not sure there is anything like it. Over the course of my three-decade career I worked on apps, system frameworks (none of this web stuff, backend stuff) and nonetheless I too had to learn all manner of new (to me) languages, API, frameworks, tools, etc. And that doesn't really cover the changes in how software is created/delivered: agile development, tech-lead driven, QA then no QA, unit tests, code reviews, etc. Always a moving target. (To add some examples. Some languages I have known: Pascal, C, 6502 assembly, (introduction of the PPC and with it a whole suite of new callbacks), C++, Objective-C, (introduction of Intel hardware and now endianness issues), Javascript, Swift. When I started my career, being good about managing memory, keeping things small and fast, was a sought after skill. Somewhere about halfway through my career you had to be an expert in concurrency — you had to be able to hold in your head multiple processes running where one can complete before another, where several threads might read or write to shared variables, and UI is being updated on the main thread, etc.) And it was unevenly distributed as well. At Apple (and likely other big companies) there were "good" and "bad" teams. And I use the quotes because I think it is often relative for the specific engineer. That is, a team I dislike — perhaps it's a highly competitive team, or one under the company spotlight — another may thrive in. After working for a few years on a particularly "bad" team, I, strangely, developed serious gastrointestinal issues that required surgery and the removal of part of my intestinal tract. Coincidence? I have no idea. But I tell people still in the field to take stress seriously. Also anecdotal: as someone who still writes checks to pay many of my bills, I can tell you that I noticed my signature was shit during periods of stress, only got relaxed and smooth again when I was also able to relax. I watch my signature now for signs that I am tense.
  • n4r9 2y ago
    > tech-lead driven Would you expand on this please? Especially how it differs to agile. Very keen to learn alternative approaches, as a tech lead struggling struggling with the company's half-baked attempts to go agile.
    • bdbcbc 2y ago
      How much time have you invested into it as a skill set ? Have you read product thinking, the lean startup, agile estimating and planning ? How do you expect to leverage a methodology if you don’t do a deep dive and become an expert.
• hzay 2y ago
  I mean, my friend's wife is an eye surgeon. My husband's cousin is a pediatrician, with neonatal specialty. I'll take software engineering.
  • sarchertech 2y ago
    Ophthalmology is one of the cushiest and best paid specialties. My wife is a pediatric ER doctor. She makes about the same as I do as a staff engineer at a big tech company, but she works 11-12 shifts a month (8-9 hour shifts). The kicker is that her hours are terrible and she has to deal with distressed parents, and sick kids, and the occasional very bad outcome. It also took her 14 years of training and $200k in debt to start making real money. But the social status of being a doctor really shouldn’t be underestimated. She has so much more autonomy than I do. Her job is as secure as a job can possibly be. And interviewing. Interviews are basically a hospital flying her out and wining and dining her to try to convince her to take the job.
    • globular-toast 2y ago
      Yeah the trouble with healthcare is it's secure if you're willing to work the shifts. Even dentists are often working long hours and on weekends etc. (although I don't think night shift is a thing). Even the best doctor will struggle to find a 9-5 that they leave on time every day. Swings and roundabouts.
• charcircuit 2y ago
  It's not insanity. The specialists are the people building platforms, libraries, and tools. The idea of understanding multiple platforms is not a crazy idea like the author tries to convey.
  • bearjaws 2y ago
    I agree, I've met a few engineers in my career who believe working in more than one language is a bad thing. Personally, I don't understand how people get by in web without knowing SQL and JS + some other language. The idea that you don't understand the flaws that SQL can introduce into a system, and have little ability to debug them is baffling. How can you actually be productive when you only control a tiny fraction of your application.
• orzig 2y ago
  I know almost none of those things. I've done great as an ML engineer. Sure I have to learn new things sometimes, but curiosity is why I got inti this in the first place
• bearjaws 2y ago
  I call the first three paragraphs the “molecule problem.” In construction, most components are standardized, bolts, nuts, screws, roof shingles, etc. Even when dimensions vary, there’s usually a standard way to interact with materials. For example, rebar has a defined role and behavior when used with concrete. Programming hasn’t developed that kind of standardization. Instead, we build software at the molecule level: if statements, loops, data structures, or the atomic level (machine code). Each company or project effectively invents its own “materials and standards” for how things are built. Imagine if every house being built didn't have standard length screws or standardized threading on bolts, it would collapse in years or take 5x longer to build. Even when we do adopt standard tools like ORMs or frameworks, it still feels like working with molecules instead of nuts and bolts. Best practices exist, but because ORMs and frameworks are so diverse, even knowing one doesn't make switching jobs fast. Again and equivalent would be that someone putting shingles on a roof in Florida can likely pick up the nail gun and put shingles on a roof in Georgia. I don’t know what a future where we have our "nuts and bolts" standarized looks like, but I know LLMs are making it infinitely worse because the amount of code being written is beyond exponential at this point.
  • hdkdicnsnjes 2y ago
    The nuts and bolts will be embeddable DSL’s, they are the only code which does not rot. Put them in a hierarchy with one compiling down into another or several and you have your building.
    • layer8 1y ago
      How would that not rot and be full of leaky abstractions?
      • hdkdicnsnjes 1y ago
        Does SQL or regex as a language rot? I’d say the abstraction above using SQL or regex to implement it rots, because it’s not formalised as a language. Does the implementation leak through things like JSON or a EBNF grammar? Performance can be a concern but the implementation doesn’t leak through the language unlike a library api. If you have access to the compiler you can adjust the implementation to get whatever performance you’d like without affecting the abstraction. Edit: JSON is a perfect example of resistance to rot and a good abstraction. You will always be able to read it in any given language because it is a language and not some library. Non DSL code should be considered as compiler output and that is what 99.9% of software devs spend their time writing. They mock people who would write assembly then go and create some fucked type hierarchy in Haskell for some business problem and call it a good abstraction. The complexity just multiplies until we end up with the current state of the industry.
• singpolyma3 2y ago
  This is why we pay experts a lot of money.
• vdupras 2y ago
  It's not that all of this is hard. Staying afloat is actually easy by mimicking whatever you see around. I guess it's akin to blissfully selling CDOs all around, right before the 2008 market crash. It's just that it's impossible to master the tools. We lie to ourselves thinking that we do, but when shit hits the fan, we're as powerless as anyone in the madhouse to figure out what is actually going on. We're all emperors with no clothes. Individually we know we're naked, but somehow, we think that someone out there isn't. Someone knows what they're doing. No they don't. Throwing LLMs into the mix will only supercharge the madness. This whole thing is a collective suicide pact.
• edwardoelliott6 2y ago
  [dead]
• moktonar 2y ago
  Lost track of the webdevhell long time ago. Total insanity changing at the speed of light, so much so that keeping up with it is a stress per-se. SE is harder from inside than it looks from the outside, but that’s also true for most jobs. So the truth is in between like most of the time. I don’t like who says that SE is a comfort job, but I also don’t agree with who says that it’s harder than any other job. But mentally yes, I’ve seen strong people pivoting to SE and dropping like flies 1-2 years later.. but IMO it’s not the job, it’s the environment that gets you
• zadler 2y ago
  So happy humans will be able to stop using their brains soon due to AI !
• weego 2y ago
  >All of this complexity is there for a reason Having gone from junior Web designer/developer to CTO/CPO and then into startups over the last 25 years, I'm absolutely convinced that the reasons for complexity in what we do day to day now is for no good reason other than CV building for FAANG type job hunting, job niche building and job security self-indulgence, and a fundamental disregard for maturing the industry.
  • bdbcbc 2y ago
    There’s definitely plenty of self indulgent gold plating engineers out there. And cv driven development and mortgage driven development. Whilst I somewhat agree with the op I think it’s as much a hiring / resourcing issue. Hiring managers often want experts in the tech stack and domain and overlook mastery of similarly complex topics as a good proxy for ability to pick up whatever their specifics are. And the expectation of that person also having enough generalist knowledge to do gui, qa & infra as well as the rest of the engineering process. In that regard as cto are you part of the problem or aiming to be part of the solution ?
  • simpaticoder 2y ago
    No, job security is why the code base is poorly written and uncommented. Pile of technology growth (POTG) is caused by a legitimate desire to avoid future pitfalls. Above all, application devs do NOT want to be in a situation where they must use first principles to keep the app alive. What they ignore is that the benefit of an added component is 1 but the cost scales as N^2. Call it "the integrator's dilemma". POTG via the integrator's dilemma is exascerbated by easy, fast dependency managers, FOMO and willful ignorance of managers to any concern other than "ship on that date". Yet doing everything from first-principles is not viable, nor is focusing only on non-functional requirements. The solution is engineering leadership that values code not written, dependencies not added. They wince at a big commit. Every component must pull its weight. They use every part of every component and dwell in the community of it. If they don't have time for a new community, they hire a new person who does, and they may represent a new specialization on your team. A solid team needs 5 people. CSS and Figma ('designer'). SPA ('front-end eng'). The appservers, database and outward api calls ('backend eng'). Infrastructure and CI/CD ('devops'). Finally, you need a person who owns goals, measuring past and articulating future, and take point on user and business comms ('product'). Project management can be a part-time role of anyone on the team, but fits well with product. I do not think a single human mind can be a designer/front-end/back-end/devops role and do a good job. They just don't have time to learn and stay up-to-date with all of that, and it requires an untenable amount of context switching.
• hasbot 2y ago
  Article completely forgot what's really important: software is supposed to provide value to users so SWEs need to understand the domain and design a system that does so. Some might say that it's the job of the business analyst but the BA doesn't design the system or feature.
• matthewmacleod 2y ago
  Over my years of hiring and working with other software engineers, I’d say they fall into two key categories: - Engineers who know how to build apps with a specific set of tools or frameworks and focus on applying this knowledge - Engineers who know how to model their work in terms of data structures and the algorithms or pipelines being applied to them The first category can be effective and efficient at applying their knowlege, particularly because of experience and practice with the tools. These are the specialists - the front-ends, the Rails devs, the embedded engineers and so on. They know more about the constraints of their environments. The second category think more about what they are doing rather than how they are doing it. They are the generalists. They think about React as a functional-ish way to convert state into a DOM tree; they recognise the value and reasons behind various different approaches to development and don’t box themselves in. I find the second category almost always more effective. That doesn’t mean specialists are without value - you need your embedded engineers to understand that space in depth, for example. Especially when hiring I like to probe for this during a system design exercise: ask a question and walk through the design of a simple system or pipeline of some kind. If the engineer answers in terms of specific technologies (“I would use Kafka to send gRPC to MongoDB”), they’re usually inflexible. If they answer in terms of techniques and data flows (“I would use a work queue to distribute payloads over the network to backing store databases”) they usually get it. I reckon changing your mindset a bit can help with the fatigue described in the article. Though I admit I’m as frustrated as anyone else the first time I bring up a new project after a whole an app the tooling has broken and the industry has moved on (looking at you, frontend!)
  • smitty1e 2y ago
    Your second category inncludes those adept at "making the problem smaller". Not always easy, but that is the first thing that comes to mind, no matter the context.
    • matthewmacleod 2y ago
      This is a great point. The first question a great software engineer should ask is “how can we avoid using software to do this?”!
• rsynnott 2y ago
  > Just tell your boss that you’re available to teach the new hires — who’ve only ever heard of React — about the joys of server-side rendering. Everything old is, apparently, new again. Last time I worked on webapps, Javascript was, at most, a minor cosmetic sprinkling, maybe with a bit of AJAX if you were daring. Everything was rendered on the server.
  • sunrunner 2y ago
    > Everything was rendered on the server. Until rendering on the client was cool. But then search engines hate that, so maybe we'd better render on the server after all but then also re-render everything on the client ('reconciliation'). Ah wait, what's this? Now you can opt for 'partial pre-rendering', because it wasn't enough to send HTML from the server and make more HTML in the client, now we can mix client-only HTML rendering with reconciled server-rendered-client-re-rendered HTML.
    • klysm 1y ago
      IMO most of this boils down to understanding if you need SEO or not. There’s no right general answer
• SebFender 2y ago
  Could be - But for me the hardest part of the job is now mostly dealing with illiteracy in tech from mid managers and up - I don't blame them as most go up the ladder mostly because they're not really decent at anything else [sorry] - but all this to say - The pain of seeing blank eyes when you have a very simple conversation let's say on input validation just kills me - A decade ago these conversations took 5 minutes - now people want to talk about it for hours as they don't get it - basically lack of core knowledge...
  • ryandrake 2y ago
    When interviewing, one of the ways I try to discover how good a particular tech job is: How far up the management totem pole does the "tech illiteracy" start? I've worked at companies where everyone, all the way up to the SVP (who reports to the CEO) is still very sharp technically. Meaning, the SVP and everyone below them could legitimately pass the Senior Software Engineer interview, or at the very least speak intelligently about the sw architecture, the reasoning behind the technical and design decisions made, performance trade-offs, security, and so on. If you've never worked for a place like that, it's almost hard to believe what it's like. I've also worked at a (fortunately only one) company, where as a leaf-node employee, my first level manager was effectively tech illiterate. Those kinds of places need their individual engineers to all 1. have good tech skills, and 2. have those rare communication/translation skills that translate tech concepts/problems into business-speek. At most companies, the point at which a technically literate employee reports to a tech-illiterate employee is somewhere up the management hierarchy--usually around "Director" level. Wherever that point on the org chart is, that person's direct reports are the ones who need to have those tech-to-non-tech translation skills.
    • SebFender 2y ago
      Absolutely & very well said - my contention lies in the fact that certain skills are just that - technical. Especially when it comes to architecture, code, complex systems and so on. I don't mind an illiterate Executive when it comes to basic manufacturing, cosmetics and so on - but when it comes to STEM subjects it becomes a dangerous gamble - especially when it comes to recognize a strong vs weak player. Too many times I've seen weaker players get bumped up as the executive in charge is somewhat incompetent... I've been lucky as my family forged my communication skills at a young age - but these days this is rare and I see extremely competent young players get sidelined quite rapidly... Hope is a mystery, but can be found.
• drewcoo 2y ago
  I tend to think all jobs are exactly as hard as the people doing them can handle. It plays well to the myth of the hard worker. We're all rugged individualists. It means companies soak as much work as possible from labor. We're all exploited. And we all accept that without question because it's the status quo.
• deleted 2y ago
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• dondraper36 2y ago
  As a software engineer myself, I agree that there are certain aspects of the job that are annoying or mentally fatiguing. That said, unfortunately I had to learn much more than I had wanted about the work of neurosurgeons and ICU units three years ago. This made me completely rethink the difficulties I face at work so I no longer complain.
• bradlys 2y ago
  Being full stack used to be more exciting to me but with the front end still changing after what felt like we had reached some stability, I have decided I can’t do it anymore. It really caters to a particular type of early startup engineer who is constantly doing greenfield and creating new repos. The issue there is that means you’re constantly poor because you’re always at early stages of funding - and in this market and the market for the next few years… good luck seeing any of those options become liquid. It’s just not a sustainable path for someone who has to pay a $3m mortgage in Silicon Valley. It’s for the already rich to tinker and the young who can live in a room in a 6bd house. My career is entirely built around full stack and it’s no shock that I’m back to being penniless. Worked so hard for nothing. Specialize and join big tech. These early stage startups suck and aren’t worth it.
• rdx90210 2y ago
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• rdxdem90210 2y ago
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• ramdemo90210 2y ago
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• karpatic 2y ago
  I've met (maybe) 3 other developers, in my life, who have used all the listed technologies. Most will either use ssh or use react; seldom ever work w both.
• tekla 2y ago
  This entire post is just complaining how this incredibly easy career that requires no credentials, pays incredibly well, and is trivial to enter sucks because you need to deal with uncomfortable things every once in a while.
  • globular-toast 2y ago
    It's not an "incredibly easy career", otherwise everyone would do it. There are always some people who find themselves in positions where they can continue to get paid for doing basically nothing and software is not excepted. But many of us had to work hard to get here and continue to do so.
    • 9rx 2y ago
      > It's not an "incredibly easy career", otherwise everyone would do it. I'm not so sure about that. "Easy" isn't usually an attractive trait in employment. People by and large seem to need some kind of feeling of fulfillment to compel them to show up day in, day out. It might seem difficult to the neurodivergent who are disproportionately attracted to software engineering, but to most people it is simply uninteresting work.
      • maximus-decimus 2y ago
        If people don't care about work being easy, then all the people in this thread should stop telling people they're not allowed to complain because their job is easy. The job being easy either matters or it doesn't.
        • 9rx 2y ago
          The job being easy doesn't matter, but neither do anyone's arbitrary statements.
      • globular-toast 2y ago
        There are plenty of people who would do uninteresting work for many multiples of median wage. Jobs like factory workers and postal sorting etc. have high turnover because they offer neither interesting work nor good pay. I've never worked with anyone who left software because they weren't autistic enough to find it interesting.
• cornhole 2y ago
  not many professions allow me to work from home in my underwear for good sums of money
  • layer8 1y ago
    That sounds compatible with insanity.
    • cornhole 1y ago
      gives you something to think about the next time you talk to your remote coworker
• koinedad 2y ago
  Depending on your role, company, and tech stack there is a lot to learn in software engineering. It can get pretty complex, confusing, etc. This is partly why I like to. I like a challenge. A puzzle. I like to learn new things. But sometimes it’s also very frustrating.
• Terr_ 2y ago
  Related: https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks > Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro,1 you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.” > They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it’s certainly more physically taxing to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you’re an ant. But, for the sake of the argument, can we agree that stress and insanity are bad things? Awesome. Welcome to programming.
• Havoc 2y ago
  That just sounds like a knowledge work job. Lots of knowledge. It’s moving. And you don’t know it all. You learn and muddle through.
• atoav 2y ago
  Not to be that guy, but other jobs are equally crazy. I had to prepare for my electrical engineering certification and I had to learn all european norms, including the ones that were valid when the places one encounters were built. Thar means I need to know which kind of circuit breaker, cable, cabling, etc. was okay to be used in any specific year in the past 100 years. The whole collection of materials amounted to over 240 GB in compressed PDFs and it took me weeks to even skim the surface. Norms are highly interdependent, a bit like hypertext without clickable links. And the best thing is that some things they just don't specify. We had a nuclear physicist in the team and he was complaining about the complexity. I love the simplicity and clarity of software engineering sometimes, because here many of the problems are by our own making.
• Jean-Papoulos 2y ago
  Yeah, turns out you need to provide value in exchange for your salary. So since there is 0 physical strain, you get mental strain. This is like writing an article about "The Insanity of Being an Adult in Modern Society" because you have to think about insurance, dishwashing, clothes, food, taking car of your car, your hair, your health, your finances, etc... Yeah. No shit.
• rektomatic 2y ago
  For a profession that has improved the world so much, we are a pessimistic lot aren’t we?
• theutopian 2y ago
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• regularjack 2y ago
  All this is still way simpler than designing and building bridges, for example.
  • nsoonhui 2y ago
    No, building bridges is a lot simpler because we have a set of coding practices to follow ( eurocode, ACI, British standards and whatnot). The performance of the buildings follow the deterministic Newton's laws, and you even have software packages written for that. Your clients don't change the specs half way through and expect you to provide an accurate estimate and at the same time, don't intend to pay you extra. You can forecast the cost of building to a very accurate degree because all bridges are more of the same, unlike software which by definition,is new every time because each time the requirement is different. And so on. I know because I work in civil engineering software field.
• theutopian 2y ago
  Hot take: I see many comments hint at a pessimistic attitude in the essay. I think this is unjust because it felt for me like the author is passionate about the profession. Otherwise the humor wouldn't be there or the author wouldn't have stuck around long enough to see the evolution of the field up to the point of this vibe coding era.
• basfo 2y ago
  Another Problem i see with this trend of "everyone is fullstack now" is that no one knows what they are doing. Basically, you and your team spent a year or so architecting and building something that you know, it's your domain, you know the in and outs of the system. Then your manager comes and says that team X needs a feature that needs a change on your system, but instead of working with them to implement it, we should work on something else and they will do the changes on our system. Clearly team X has no experience on the stack or the system itself, and they start to create nonsensical PRs that don't even compile, you spent a lot of time reviewing those, explaining them the issues until it becomes a political/ego driven discussion and... congratulations you are a blocker now. You experience the same working on your own feature, messing with code that you don't like or even understand, creating yamls that you don't have a clue on what they actually do, just replacing string where you see it fit, learning on production. Of course, you have no time to actually understand what you are doing, is expected to be done by yesterday. Suddenly, in name of productivity, everyone is working in the less efficient way possible, taking months what could be weeks, weeks what could be days, and days what could be hours.
• richforman 2y ago
  I was a developer for about forty years, retired last year. First seven years or so I worked in MUMPS on mostly DEC VAX midframes. Then in the early 90s I learned Visual Basic to break into the Windows world, worked in that for almost a decade until .NET came out in about 2000; I learned VB.NET, programmed in that for about six or seven years. Then I taught myself C# which is what I used for the next 13 years or so. I did lots of SQL Server programming account the way, but outside of that, those were really the only languages/frameworks that I needed to have a consistent career for almost four decades.
  • taway1874 1y ago
    Awesome! I am about halfway (~25 years) in and all I needed so far was C#/SQL Server/VS etc. Do you think I can get away for another 15 years?
• dmvjs 1y ago
  uhh just use vite
• anarticle 1y ago
  It is unusual as a comparison to other careers, esp with respect to specialization, but that is the system. Some people revel in learning new things. Software is unsatisfying compared to other jobs because when you close your laptop and you look around you think: "Did I change anything in the world?" Compare that with doing masonry, where at the end of the day you can look at a wall of bricks that you have laid, and mortared with your own hands. Tomorrow, that wall will be there. Next year, that wall will be there. Can you say the same of your code? If you have a computer science degree you see the commonality as well as the differences between languages and systems. You pick up new things extremely fast. For all of the negatives against university, that is the benefit. Maybe we need a memento mori for coders: What code of yours is still running today? Ask yourself that, one week, one year, five years, ten years after.
  • le-mark 1y ago
    Facts. I worked on a retail system that was nearly 1M loc and the company went bankrupt. Poof all that work gone. That was a real epiphany for me, and also the start of keeping a healthy distance between me and my work. Although software can be very rewarding, it is just a job.
• d_burfoot 1y ago
  One of my pet theories about the software industry is that nobody really knows how to manage mature tech companies (YC and the startup world are pretty good at running young companies). One obvious and disastrous phenomenon in the tech world is resume-driven development: some engineers are highly motivated to put the next shiny tech buzzword on their resume, so they make sure to push that technology at their company. 9 times out of 10 the project and company would be better off by just using the standard, boring tech that everyone else uses. Tech managers should be able to detect this pattern and squash it, but they don't seem able to do so.
  • kevinventullo 1y ago
    Front-line managers and PM’s have the same incentives.
  • jack_h 1y ago
    Resume driven development is the flip-side to stagnating compensation that falls below market rates over time. If an engineer knows they will have to look for a job every so often they will try to bolster their resume in an attempt to differentiate themselves from all of the other applicants.
  • phonon 1y ago
    > YC and the startup world are pretty good at running young companies Are they? I just saw a job ad for a YC start-up that proudly explained that "We don't do PRs. We push straight to main multiple times a day." and that "We work onsite, 7 days a week"...all for a company that works in a heavily regulated industry.
    • MonkeyClub 1y ago
      > "We work onsite, 7 days a week" That's how you get them pyramids built! Onsite weeklong lashings!
• travisgriggs 1y ago
  > Software gets more complicated. All of this complexity is there for a reason. Not any good reason, imo. There used to be incentives for efficiency in various aspects of the field. Scarcity of talent, scarcity of bandwidth and compute power, scarcity of budgets. Twenty years of “let’s all be programmers”, unhinged amounts of money, and design by committee, have rendered it a very complex world.
  • hx8 1y ago
    I disagree. We add complexity largely (but not exclusively) because they fix problems. The entire point of a web browser exists to solve the very complex problem "How do we run arbitrary code on client hardware in a way that's safe for all parties?"
    • skydhash 1y ago
      What’s about sharing documents which is still it’s primary purpose. And most of the current complexity stems from the sprawling JS API surface. We know how to sandbox software (VM and malware analysis,…), browser’s complexity is mostly corporate driven.
      • bluecheese452 1y ago
        I don’t think that has been its primary purpose for a long time. If you want to share a document for the most part you email it. It has long since moved from documents to applications.
        • layer8 1y ago
          s/sharing/publishing/ The web was never much used for sharing documents in the emailing sense.
      • hx8 1y ago
        I had forgotten the original purpose of web browsers was to view hyperlinked documents. It seems like we abandoned that as the primary use case over 20 years ago, with technology such as Flash, Silverlight, and Java Weblets.
• chiffre01 1y ago
  Considering that software is entirely artificial, I would argue that disciplines in the physical sciences are likely much more difficult when it comes to breaking new ground or discovering novel technologies and solutions to longstanding problems. Just think about how little progress has been made in solving complex issues like climate change, curing diseases or securing sustainable food supplies. These are incredibly challenging, real-world problems. In contrast, software engineering often comes down to rearranging data—it’s powerful, but not always as fundamentally complex as tackling the physical world's hardest issues.
  • yummypaint 1y ago
    Technologically speaking, climate change, world hunger, poverty, peace, etc are all solved problems already. Unfortunately these aren't technical problems. They are social, political, and economic in nature. The world has had the means to globally end poverty and hunger for decades, but we haven't. We know exactly and quantitatively what is needed to meet climate goals, but we won't do it. Groups of people who have been murdering each other for generations could choose to stop tomorrow and live in peace forever after, but they refuse. These are as far from technological problems as one can get.
  • computerdork 1y ago
    Agree that physical sciences, on one aspect, are inherently more difficult, Especially in research, the problems are more difficult to solve because they are limited by the physical world. But also think that is what makes dev work so difficult, because our "build times" are so short. Because we aren't limited by the real world, we can build our entire system often in seconds and then test them, which allows us to move fast and generate enormous amounts of complexity. While with physical sciences, during an experiment, the "build time" for their tests is typically much slower, often taking hours or days, so they can only deal with a limited number of variables and information at once. Also think that is what makes software engineers often good at working in other technical domains, we have a lot techniques and hands on experience in dealing with large complex systems, much of which carries over to non-software problems... (... but my saying this is admittedly half theoretical, because personally, haven't actually applied this to an actual science field, only to things like small construction projects and to the field of music theory, and yeah, super helpful)
• 65 1y ago
  I mean, my job title is currently "Full Stack Software Engineer" and I manage to get by only writing Typescript. Yes I have to do all of the things mentioned in the article: React, CSS, AWS, Docker, Databases, etc. We do a lot of greenfield so I'm the one setting these things up. But it's basically all in the web paradigm. I don't have to work on mobile apps or drivers or something. So I think "Full stack" isn't really a good descriptor. I'm more so a "Web developer" than anything. Which is complicated, yes, but if you were a mobile developer your world would be completely different and have its own software ecosystem.
  • ldng 1y ago
    You haven't been tasked with mobile and AI ... YET !
• Animats 1y ago
  Especially since web pages today don't really do all that much more than web pages did a decade ago. Yet the machinery is far more complex, the download size of pages is much larger, and pages are less responsive.
• mdaniel 1y ago
  > You do a good job. You’re promoted to manager. You need to learn a whole other job Relevant: https://nebula.tv/videos/coldfusion-why-are-managers-so-bad-at-their-jobs https://nebula.tv/videos/coldfusion-why-are-managers-so-bad-... (or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7-UdDg5uIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7-UdDg5uIw if Nebula won't show it to you) The tl;dw is that quite obviously the years and years spent learning one skillset absolutely does not translate into the ability to "debug humans"
  • ninju 1y ago
    a.k.a. the Peter Principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
    • mdaniel 1y ago
      That was one of the main topics of the video, yes, but the rest of it looked at some research into how to address it. One study showed that just promoting people at random had better outcomes, and a separate study showed that "up or out" was also effective. I would guess that the choice between them is mostly about the culture of the organization
      • hx8 1y ago
        I'd like to read that random promotion paper. I wonder how high up they actually implemented this strategy, because the idea of the CEO just being the person that chosen at random more than anyone else is hilarious to me.
        • mdaniel 1y ago
          My mental model is that "promotion" is something that only happens to middle managers; board relevant seats are either appointed by the board or come from the good ole' boy network (which I do recognize is almost certainly worse than promoting a bad manager from within, who at least has existing relationships and business context) As best I can tell, it's this one https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378437111003943#:~:text=providing%20further%20support%20to%20our%20claim%20that%20a%20random%20strategy%20seems%20to%20be%20a%20very%20simple%20and%20interesting%20way%20to%20increase%20the%20efficiency%20of%20any%20real%20organization https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784...
• maeln 1y ago
  > But what happened to specializing? When a house is being built, tons of people are involved: architects, civil engineers, plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, interior designers, roofers, surveyors, pavers, you name it. You don’t expect a single person, or even a whole single company, to be able to do all of those. You would be surprised. While it stays more or less true for low-education job, I find that any job that require more than a high-school diploma suffer from the same problem. We are asked to be more and more polyvalent, and every job offer has a laundry list of skills that we are supposed to master. When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense: Why pay two expert when one person with just enough knowledge can wing it ? Unless the job/task is highly regulated (you don't wing accounting) or the output quality really matter, a half-ass job is often 99% enough. Taking about building a house, you can kind of see it actually. A lot of building company are doing the bare minimum, which is why inspection is critical.
• TriangleEdge 1y ago
  Other then all the frameworks you need learn, if you are not an expert in a specific field, in my experience, you are completely disposable as well.
• clircle 1y ago
  [flagged]
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• m2has 1y ago
  This was a fun read. We’ll keep raising the amount of knowledge needed to be employed until it’s no longer sustainable. This is just the nature of capitalism: extracting as much value from someone’s salary as possible.
• ravenstine 1y ago
  The majority of companies don't want "engineers", but settle for the necessary evil of who they believe are totally fungible "resources". Given how many programmers get into software development for reasons that go against human fungibility, they have to be tricked by the propaganda of being referred to as engineers.
• nwhnwh 1y ago
  The insanity of modernity, progress and change.
  • overu589 1y ago
    > WW3 has already come and gone. You are no longer masters of your own destinies. You have been sold out, and what ever is left of you is a sell out. You will be broken. Only in the darkness of minds eye, where no one will hear your screams, they will break you and remake you, your thought controlls, for their games. For they are as god over you and they are the voices in your mind. The world will scorn you and turn upon you in your desperate hour, and in time it will happen to all of them. We are thought controlled.
    • nwhnwh 1y ago
      I still have some hope. A global revolution.
      • overu589 1y ago
        You are talking about the drama of Men. I am describing the Powers who are as God over Men. And of which all the drama among Men (even their warfare) are games. Are you prepared to bear the terrible burden? https://pastebin.com/3cPXbjhA https://pastebin.com/3cPXbjhA
        • nwhnwh 1y ago
          Get out of your ivory tower and do something about it.
          • overu589 1y ago
            It’s happening, right now.
            • nwhnwh 1y ago
• holografix 1y ago
  Very much a case of “grass is always greener”. I work in pre-sales at $FAANG and would do everything to take a 20% pay cut and go work a low pressure SWE role flinging golang around. My lord… the lack of political maneuvering, fiefdom building and defending, workaholics chasing deals and responses through the weekend or first thing at 5:30am when they wake up… I did a short stint as part of a pro services team at a SaaS once. Some of the most fun I’ve had, moderate to low pressure, interesting but not overly challenging problems, mostly a creativity challenge not “configure systemd” challenges. Now I know whT you’re thinking: “oh but here in SWE land we have all the problems you mentioned too!” Yep that’s my point.
• arealaccount 1y ago
  > Then came DevOps. Some cash-strapped company somewhere decided that now all of this would be handled by the engineers and everyone agreed. Gave me a chuckle. I don’t think it was a cash strapped company but yea that’s pretty much what happened.
  • zikduruqe 1y ago
    To me, it is pretty much this -> https://imgur.com/a/pT5WNKj https://imgur.com/a/pT5WNKj