As Marc Anderssen famously wrote, “Software is Eating the World” just before he set light to it with his venture capital ideas. Since then he has doubled down on his pro-progress and I would say rather anti-humane Techno-Optimist Manifesto.
The productization of software development is a journey lasting many decades. Since DevOps, Agile, CI/CD coupled with rampant venture capitalism and low interest rates, our jobs as software engineers have become more mundane. While Big Tech co-opts open-source, we’ve seen the creativity be sucked out of a profession which essentially now is reduced to us all glueing pipes of ever-increasing diameter to each other.
The logical extension of venture capitalism, web-scale cloud infrastructure, big data and automation is LLM and GenAI. The generation of not just code but also creative endeavour is becoming a series of increasingly dull agile release train moments.
Even taking some time to not feel bad about ourselves has to be scheduled into our corporate engineer lives.
WebScale Brings A Lack of Imagination
So, if every day is Groundhog Day in this engineering universe, has so-called “good software engineering practice” simply become a proxy for greed? We are using the tools we are told to use. We are building our CVs to do another job where we will do precisely the same as before working with very similar people.
If we are all given the same tools, is it any surprise that we build the same solutions to the same problems repeatedly? If we have not built that thing before, should we be entitled to build it? Is being busy the same as being productive?
We’re not innovating by building a website. We’re not innovating by building another app or scaling some infrastructure. We don’t win by having green pipelines.
We all work the same way using the same tools and the same technologies.
Ask yourself, is this it? Or should we actually be innovating? Could we actually do something interesting rather than just doing ‘software engineering’?
You can refuse to go the conference. You can refuse to compete in the corporate hackathon. You can refuse to go back to the office.
Life’s too short to work for boring companies that only have boring ideas or the same ideas as the rest.
Stop sitting around feeling sorry for yourself. As a privileged engineer, you always have a choice.