[HN Gopher] The Insanity of Being a Software Engineer
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The Insanity of Being a Software Engineer
Author : vmsp
Score : 65 points
Date : 2025-04-06 11:16 UTC (11 hours ago)
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| abxyz wrote:
| > 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.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| Exactly. Tell a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, fast
| food employee how hard your software job is.
| sarchertech wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| stefanos82 wrote:
| 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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!
| threatofrain wrote:
| Just want to echo the person who already replied, but
| contracting is a different world. One might argue that
| when you're a contractor you're also an independent
| businessman -- and thus you own the responsibility of win
| or die.
| II2II wrote:
| > I think it's an unfair comparison here.
|
| Don't say that to a truck driver, construction worker,
| farmer, or fast food employee.
|
| > 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!
|
| Going home at the end of the day and not having to think
| about work is sure great, except that fast food employee is
| probably doing their second job. As for that farmer, in one
| respect or other they're almost certainly operating their
| own business. Not managing. Operating. They're going to
| have trouble setting aside the stress of the job at night
| as well. Construction workers, well, they will be all over
| the map. Some will be like farmers, operating their own
| business. Some may be doing heavy or dangerous labor. Day
| to day, their job may rank as tiring. Over extended
| periods, they are expending their body. Short of switching
| to a trade, their career is on a clock. Truck drivers have
| their own issues to deal with. Again, a lot of them are
| operating their own business (even when the work
| arrangements make it feel like they're employed by someone
| else). If they're working within an urban area, they're
| typically driving in less than ideal circumstances for
| hours on end and dealing with a system that tries to make
| the system's problems the trucker's problems. Some long-
| haul drivers may earn a decent paycheck, at the cost of
| being on the road for days on end and being pushed outside
| of the safety envelope.
|
| So yeah, everyone has something to complain about. But if
| you want those people to think that SWE's are arrogant
| jerks, then just go on saying how much worse your job is
| than yours.
| rini17 wrote:
| Not easy either but they have less of "the reward for work
| done is more work more learning".
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dharmab wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/02/01/gray-
| colla...
| dharmab wrote:
| I don't think anyone in that room would have agreed with
| that term.
| trallnag wrote:
| Why?
| dharmab wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dharmab wrote:
| The Wikipedia article that comment linked to in a later
| edit says it's a controversial definition and says that
| such professions are typically described as white collar.
| That seems to support my statement?
| marcusb wrote:
| I get that people want to Categorize All The Things, but
| this doesn't seem like a particularly useful category. If
| you look at the list in the Wikipedia article, it
| includes "skilled tradespeople/technicians". That alone
| represents a pretty big chunk of work traditionally
| considered "blue collar."
| goda90 wrote:
| Whether you want to use a "grey collar" category or not,
| it's still best to avoid putting white collar on a
| pedestal over blue collar.
| nkrisc wrote:
| It's equally insulting to insinuate that some blue collar
| jobs don't also require more education and have much
| higher pressure and consequences for error than many
| white collar jobs.
|
| There are many blue collar jobs that require a lot of
| education and the consequences of errors is loss of life.
| dharmab wrote:
| Most of the people in that room had worked blue collar
| jobs, worked through school, and retrained in white
| collar professions.
|
| I would have been incredibly rude to tell them "No, your
| job isn't _really_ white collar, and you haven't changed
| your social standing as much as you thought."
| jart wrote:
| In the US about 60% of the workforce is "white collar".
|
| Being proud of that is like being proud of a six figure
| salary in California.
| dharmab wrote:
| A person cannot be proud of their individual
| achievements, self improvements, working at a job they
| wanted, or providing for their families? Simply because
| many others have done the same?
| robocat wrote:
| Are you saying 60% of California workers earn minimum six
| figures?
| saurik wrote:
| I find your definition of "insulting" really confusing,
| as pretty much all "white collar jobs" are "I sit on my
| butt all day and think lazily about things with very
| little pressure" jobs. They push paper and write reports
| on things, maybe doing some annoying math at times, but
| the entire concept of a "high pressure" job with
| "consequences for error" seems entirely at odds with
| white collar, and I'd personally have expected people who
| actually do something important on a daily basis (unlike,
| for example, me) might would find being categorized as
| "white collar" insulting?
| robocat wrote:
| That's foolishly confusing.
|
| It breaks the original metaphor, and nobody knows it or the
| confusing borders of the definition - bad for
| communicating.
|
| Most people seem prideful to self-identify into blue-collar
| or white-collar.
|
| What's the meaning of the obviously next step pink-collar
| or black-collar?
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > One friend had just finished a 3 month program
|
| In software by the time you finish your 3 months course the
| tech is considered obsolete.
|
| Not just Frontend. Backend can change on a dime.
|
| Elastic/MySQL/CockroachDB is using different license that's
| incompatible to AWS. We have to switch our stack!
|
| Kafka is out. It's all about Iggy! What do you mean it's
| different language? Learn it!
|
| Things can be hard in different ways. After coding for whole
| week doing garden work can almost come as a relief.
| grandempire wrote:
| > by the time you finish your 3 months course the tech is
| considered obsolete.
|
| This is a meme that's just not true. Nobody outside of the
| most junior applicant or most transient contractor is paid
| for the skills they learned this year.
|
| The most important skills last forever. Getting a good CS
| or EE degree is still the best way to get started.
| dharmab wrote:
| Exactly. In the past ten years the main differences in my
| professional tech stack are that I write Go instead of
| Java and my software runs in containers on Kubernetes
| instead of JAR files on CentOS. My friends have all had
| much more significant changes and retraining in their
| careers.
| grandempire wrote:
| Yep even within internet technology this is ridiculous.
| Imagine we time machined a Perl old-head from 1995 only
| knowing http, Unix, networking, etc. They could be
| invaluable at any company in a month.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> They could be invaluable at any company in a month._
|
| That's a made up fantasy. They wouldn't get hired at all
| in real life. Ask me how I know. Where I live recruiters
| only check that your recent experience and stack match
| the ones on the job, otherwise your resume goes in the
| bin.
|
| Like Ygg2 said below, employers don't want generalists
| with generic CS knowledge, they want people they can
| immediately slot in and start crushing Jira tickets.
| grandempire wrote:
| > employers don't want generalists with generic CS
| knowledge
|
| That's not true. Like I said, this is more of a problem
| if you are trying to break in.
|
| > people they can immediately slot in and start crushing
| Jira tickets.
|
| This is representative of the only the most precarious
| software contracts.
|
| > They wouldn't get hired at all in real life.
|
| I have hiring capability and I would hire them.
|
| The poster said their skills would be out of date. I
| think you're confusing a sales problem for a skill
| problem.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> That's not true._
|
| It's the case wherever I applied, which makes it true for
| me.
|
| _> This is representative of the only the most
| precarious software contracts._
|
| Same argument as above.
|
| _> I have hiring capability and I would hire them._
|
| Where are you located? Do you hire fully remote?
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > In the past ten years the main differences in my
| professional tech stack are that I write Go instead of
| Java.
|
| Ten years isn't enough time to standardize something and
| make it a job requirement.
| grandempire wrote:
| The comment we are responding to said it takes 3 months
| for tech skills to go out of date.
| dharmab wrote:
| Do you want the list of things that haven't changed since
| I started programming as a kid?
|
| I still write a lot of Python and shell. I still use
| Linux, mostly systemd. (I did have to use initscripts
| early on and do not miss them at all. systemd's way
| easier.) The entire networking stack has changed only
| minimally, with only early versions of SSL/TLS becoming
| obsolete. All the software I use to do my job is the same
| (A terminal, Vim, Firefox, GNU coreutils, and a
| smattering of other tools). I still use the same cloud
| services and databases. The skills I learned in school
| are equally as useful today as they were then, especially
| math and CS theory.
|
| The only major shift during my career has been migrating
| from Linux VMs to containers on clusters (first on Mesos,
| then Kubernetes). Having administered both at scale,
| Kubernetes is a lot easier.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > I still write a lot of Python and shell. I still use
| Linux
|
| All of those listed things have changed. Python went from
| 2 to 3, number of shells has multiplied like rabbits.
| Linux changed in leaps and bounds. It got async, BPF,
| different tech stacks, and window environments.
|
| > Do you want the list of things that haven't changed
| since I started programming as a kid?
|
| Sure basic principles have remained the same, but huge
| chunks of ecosystem have been transformed. Perhaps we are
| looking at it from different perspectives.
|
| It's kinda like ecosystems. Amazon tropical rainforest
| looks the same now as it did 1000 years ago from birds
| eye view. But on the ground entire species came and went,
| and the species living there changed dramatically, in
| quality and quantity.
|
| My issue is, employers don't want general knowledge, they
| want an easily slottable asset. You need to know their
| tech stack. Even if it changes. Hence why LLMs are so in
| demand.
| MrJohz wrote:
| Python 3 is not that different from Python 2. Yes, if
| you're a mindless interpreter designed to specifically
| parse and evaluate Python 2 code, you're going to have a
| hard time with Python 3. Thankfully, software developers
| are humans and should not have this issue.
|
| The number of shells that are relevant to any workplace I
| have worked in have been two, possibly three if you're
| working somewhere heavily Apple-based. All three of these
| shells are POSIX-compatible. Other shells exist, but are
| entirely optional and rarely used (I say this as someone
| using one of those other shells).
|
| Linux has changed more, and is probably the biggest
| source of change in the list that the previous poster
| described, but as they point out, most of these changes
| make managing Linux systems simpler, and shouldn't really
| cause significant problems.
|
| I think you're strongly exaggerating the scale of changes
| here.
|
| > My issue is, employers don't want general knowledge,
| they want an easily slottable asset. You need to know
| their tech stack. Even if it changes. Hence why LLMs are
| so in demand.
|
| I'm a frontend developer. Every job I've had, I was not
| familiar with the specific framework they were using when
| I went in for that job. In every case, that's not been a
| problem at all, because I've been able to clearly
| demonstrate that I understand the foundation of frontend
| development, which is far more important than the precise
| technologies used in the company's framework of choice.
| My experiences in general are the complete opposite of
| what you describe here: every single employer that I've
| worked for has wanted primarily deeper general knowledge
| rather than specific knowledge of their specific stack.
|
| Maybe this is a market thing -- maybe things really are
| that different here in Europe -- but your descriptions do
| not ring true at all for me.
| grandempire wrote:
| > a 3 month program to certify
|
| Industries with difficult certifications tend to protect
| those when awarded. It's a grind to get in but then the
| employment is easy and lucrative.
|
| This is the promise of a career as a pilot or doctor. (Inb4
| doctors do hard things)
|
| In contrast, industries that are lucrative but have a low
| barrier to entry (sales, real estate, etc) tend to have
| direct performance competition.
| ltdanimal wrote:
| Maybe we should agree that all jobs can't be compared apples
| to apples. I have 3 good friends that fly for major airlines.
| I'm pretty familiar with the jobs.
|
| -Those tests are no joke, but saying they are more intense
| than a 4 year CS degree is ridiculous. Also the major
| airlines you can compare to FAANG, and many people study for
| 6+ months to pass those interviews - Airlines are union jobs.
| If you get them you aren't getting fired unless you try to do
| something really stupid. - There isn't any wondering if you
| are doing a good job or not , and you don't take any work
| home. - Regulations change or you can switch planes, but the
| career is leaps and bounds more static then SWE.
|
| Net net is that they are very different jobs. SWE is a great
| gig overall but I take issues with people saying how much
| harder or easier it is than other jobs. "It depends" is the
| answer.
| deeelle wrote:
| I feel like I've experienced the opposite honestly. I'm a
| mechanical engineer, and my wife's old college friends
| consist of a bunch of silicon valley techies.
|
| Out of 10 people off the top of my head, most of them have
| been laid off in the past 5 years. For the ones that found
| new jobs (that I know) they are not satisfied with their pay.
|
| I've talked my pay vs theirs and am shocked. Almost a decade
| worth of experience, making what I was making 4 years into
| engineering, in non management positions, and worse job
| security.
|
| I could be mixing up programmer vs SWE. I just call them
| techies.
| NL807 wrote:
| Easiest careers, but also the hardest job to keep things from
| becoming an ungodly mess.
| dharmab wrote:
| I used to work in a hospital. Software ain't bad at all,
| haha.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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".
| everdrive wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| FWIW that 10% almost entirely comes from the current
| economic shock. At the beginning of 2025 1 USD was about
| 1 Euro.
| goda90 wrote:
| Software engineering can also be incredibly satisfying
| regardless of money. It depends on what you're working on and
| who you're working with. There's a great feeling when you get
| into flow while writing interesting software or tackling a
| puzzling problem.
| filoleg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _> 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 wrote:
| 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).
| tiberriver256 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sshine wrote:
| 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.
| BenGosub wrote:
| Very inspiring comment. I suppose that software development
| was a much more impactful job back in the days.
|
| I do get pleasure when building software, but like many
| others I also dream about starting a farm to diversify my
| income and get some physical work regularly.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| 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.
| chrsw wrote:
| 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.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| 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.
| grahar64 wrote:
| 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
| ginko wrote:
| This should be called "The Insanity of Being a Web Developer".
| You can be an SE without ever touching JS.
| sebtron wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I feel the opposite. Sometimes I feel non-web developers
| don't consider web devs as "real devs", esp. the frontend
| ones.
| chrsw wrote:
| 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.
| gundamdoubleO wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| It's maybe a bit orthogonal? (Or maybe misleading.) I'll fill
| in with anecdotes and try to make more sense:
|
| When I started at Apple in 1995 the way things got done was:
| you worked with a team that focused on, for example, the
| graphics frameworks of the OS. One engineer was tech-lead.
| They went to SIGGRAPH, tried to have their finger on the
| pulse of the "industry" and, of course, what our users wanted
| ... in terms of graphics on the platform.
|
| So a new OS meant an opportunity to add some of these desired
| features to our frameworks. Tech-lead generally called the
| shots, chose various engineers on the team to own various
| parts. And so we coded.
|
| And maybe I am getting a bit off topic here, describing
| something more like "ownership" for a dev on a team:
|
| We still had company-wide mandates but again it would be an
| engineer on a team that either volunteered or was selected to
| take responsibility for some "deliverable". When the Mac was
| moving to PowerPC I was handed the "color pickers" from the
| Mac source base that were written in 68K assembly, I was
| expected to get them to compile for PPC. In addition to
| rewriting them in C, I also cleaned up the SPI that allowed
| the color pickers to be modular. I wasn't asked to, but I
| wrote a crayon color picker, an HTML color picker to test the
| SPI and because, at least with the HTML picker, I thought
| users would want that (the web being the new thing).
|
| I had no idea then that it would not always be like this. On
| one hand, having to port code from 68K to C was definitely an
| example of the constant change I would see over the coming
| decades in my career. But no way did I see coming engineer-
| as-commodity (and I think of Agile like this, engineers are
| interchangeable cogs), the flip to top-down control (as in
| management or design telling engineers what to do instead of
| bottom-up where the team itself made many of the decisions).
|
| I'll end with this: I loathe agile development. But I have
| seen engineers that thrive in that environment so I am not
| one to condemn it.
|
| For engineers that seem unhappy I have always suggested that
| they be given a piece of code (or class, or part of a
| framework, or a whole framework if it is feasible) that they
| can "own".
|
| And by own I mean they make all the changes, fix all the
| bugs, etc. They own the tech debt, are free (time permitting)
| to toss everything and rewrite it if they choose to. They
| chart the direction of the code going forward. They become
| the domain expert of that code.
|
| For many engineers (and me of course) this can be the most
| rewarding way to work.
|
| The only pushback I hear from those agile-minded is, "What if
| that person leaves? Now we have no domain expert regarding
| that code?"
|
| They're right. Someone else will have to take it over.
| Perhaps even a new hire. And soon they too will "own" it --
| may even rewrite it. But we're engineers, we can figure this
| shit out. ;-)
| jjav wrote:
| > For many engineers (and me of course) this can be the
| most rewarding way to work.
|
| Agreed, this is also the world I grew up in. Nothing is as
| rewarding as working on something where you have ownership
| to set the direction and deliver.
|
| For most of my career I had never heard of "product
| managers" and it was bliss. Somehwere along the line
| software engineer transformed from being the intellectual
| lead of the business, to simply a ticket-taker writing code
| for things some completely non-technical "product managers"
| decided should be done this week. And the inability to be
| allowed to think or plan for anything beyond a two week
| sprint window is mentally crushing.
|
| I've moved to different roles now since software
| engineering became such a miserable job. I'd jump back in a
| heartbeat though if there was a company operating like we
| did in the 80s and 90s where engineers owned engineering.
| hzay wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| charcircuit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| atmavatar wrote:
| "If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote
| programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy
| civilization." - Gerald Weinberg
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| This is why we pay experts a lot of money.
| vdupras wrote:
| 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.
| moktonar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| So happy humans will be able to stop using their brains soon due
| to AI !
| weego wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| owebmaster wrote:
| That's a terrible take to blame the engineers for the
| complexity, not the ever changing specs, headcount inflating
| and managers that have no idea what software engineering is. I
| would blame the CTOs.
| sunrunner wrote:
| > blame the engineers for the complexity
|
| I was going to add that the engineers themselves do (or
| should, in a healthy organisation) have the mandate to
| knowingly choose not to bring in artifical complexity where
| it's not useful or required.
|
| But then I thought that in a lot of situtations perhaps the
| engineers aren't really 'Knowingly choosing not to' but
| 'Unknowingly choosing to' bring in that complexity, because
| the volume of content and mindshare that goes into proposing
| new and alternate ways of working and tools that aren't
| actually different seems to dwarf the amount of information
| around fundamentals and things that don't change as often.
|
| So perhaps any accountability really should go as much to
| CTOs, open source developers trying to make their mark,
| influencers.
| sunrunner wrote:
| > CV building for FAANG type job hunting, job niche building
| and job security self-indulgence, and a fundamental disregard
| for maturing the industry
|
| I think there is both an inherent complexity and artificial (or
| 'introduced') complexity in software.
|
| Inherent complexity comes from increasing expectations over
| what kinds of software we want to write (the evolution of the
| web and browser 'features' since its initial inception, the
| kinds of interaction on mobile, tablet and desktop devices) and
| _how_ we want to write that.
|
| Some amount of higher-level tooling is almost a necessity
| because the absolute amount of lower-level things needed to
| make the more powerful abstractions work is too high to deal
| with practical. Want to write a cross-platform fully-featured-
| with-animation UI toolkit with just the raw hardware in your
| desktop? Fantastic exercise for learning, but you're almost
| guaranteed to start reaching for higher-level tools at some
| point in the journey.
|
| The growth in artificial complexity, however, comes from so
| many places (including all the ones you listed).
|
| Sometimes it's from processes and ways of working that are
| introduced (I sure hope you do fully automated releasable
| builds including management of the computers that do those).
|
| Sometimes it's from socio-technical problems (working in a
| single shared code base and having to coordinate changes and
| releases? Surely it would be easier for teams to never have to
| talk to each other and just release small things
| independently...).
|
| Sometimes it's from an approach to building software that is
| perceived as better, easier and faster (shipping a desktop
| application? Wouldn't it be so much easier to just bundle a
| full UI layout engine, scripting language interpreter,
| hierarchical appearance control syntax, portable bytecode
| interpreter and some application code that was itself compiled
| from a _different_ language so it could be interpreted by the
| interpreter you actually shipped...)
|
| Sometimes it's from system design approaches that are pushed as
| 'best practice' and introduced without necessarily
| understanding whether you ever had the problem they were
| intended to solve (please, tell me more about how your
| relatively small ecommerce application needed to be event based
| in order to 'scale up').
|
| Sometime it's because the handful of companies shipping
| acceleration hardware have practically zero commercial
| incentive to standardise on an API for writing programs that
| can run on said hardware, giving us a world with four (at
| least) slightly different syntaxes that all sort-of-mostly
| accomplish the same thing while being awkwardly different.
|
| I could go on...
|
| Not that some of the artifical introduced complexity doesn't
| sometimes solve actual problems or be an overall-useful thing
| to have. No criticism here on introducing software-based
| processes to formalise things, improve software quality, and so
| on.
|
| But it's useful to keep in mind how much of the complexity is
| introduced to improve overall processes versus 'solving' for
| some local maxima by adding more tech without the overall
| software quality improving, with the end result being we've
| made our own lives worse in some way, without measurably
| improving the resulting application.
| hasbot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| SebFender wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| drewcoo wrote:
| 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.
| dondraper36 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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