The Ever Changing Profession of Software Engineering

I love being a software engineer. I feel lucky I get to do it. I got into software a little later in life. I started working young and worked for about 15 years before I got my first software job. I worked in hospitality, construction, farming, sales, landscaping and general manual labour. When I got my first software job, I got my first experience of really loving what I do and seeing a good future for myself.

I've been thinking a lot about how much and how quickly things have been changing. Obviously the days of ZIRP (Zero Interest-Rate Policy) were crazy and it was obvious to everyone it was not sustainable. Being a software engineer when the demand was so high was nice, although I failed to take full advantage of it. I worried then what the correction would be like and in some ways it's even worse than I imagined. That said, being a software engineer right now is still much better than the jobs I've done before.

When I was in my last year of college in 2011, one of our lecturers brought us to an event in the Dublin Convention center. I had never been to anything like it. There was a panel at the end. One of the speakers felt the need to tell us we had no real hope of getting good jobs. The market was going to be flooded with cheap labor and nobody will want European engineers. He said getting a CS degree was like training kitchen porters. Having worked as a kitchen porter I was mildly offended (that's hard and important work!) but I still worried about what he said. We had lecturers expressing similar concerns to us. Engineers from China and India are cheaper and better and there won't be work for us. This wasn't long after the financial crisis. Things looked bleak but I didn't care. It's the only thing I wanted to do and I took the first job I was offered right before I graduated.

That kind of pessimistic view about the software industry is not new. In 1961 people worried that “abstraction will damage our profession”. When high level languages like COBOL and FORTRAN came along, software engineering was again cooked. From an interview with Joyce Currie Little: As a matter of fact, when FORTRAN first came out, you would hear people saying, “We don’t need programmers anymore.”

For as long as software engineering has existed, people have been predicting its demise. People are always predicting the demise of everything and occasionally they're even right.

I can't help but feel optimistic though. Even if the economics aren't the same as the crazy ZIRP days, there's just nothing quite like this work. If I absolutely had to, I could go back to one of the various other industries I worked in, or try something else and make enough to live but I don't think that's going to be necessary and I don't want to.

Gergely Orosz had a post recently about about how the job of software engineering is a lot about the willingness to keep learning and dealing with constant change.

One of the reasons I love working in software so much is because it's hard and constantly changing. I remember working at a bar. Every night I had to scrub the same floors, get everything exactly as it was before the day began. The repetitive nature of the job drove me nuts. No real goal, nothing changes, just keep repeating the same thing over and over. It wasn't all bad but that part got to me for some reason.

AI is the current big change. The doomers are out telling us we won't have good jobs soon and getting into software now is like training to be a kitchen porter. I don't believe it. Everything everywhere is always moving, forever but it doesn't always have to be bad. I find it far more useful to talk about how we can get better at what we do, use the change to our advantage, make things that people like to use and build resiliency to deal with the constant attacks we're seeing today.

Good software engineers are problem solvers trying to make things better. We need more people like that, not less. Sometimes the results are bad like with enshittification, so we need more good decent people in the profession, not less.