Take pride in your craft

Software engineers don’t just crank out code, are not just machines to convert coffee into executables / web-apps. Yet, more and more of the industry seems to push towards that.

There is a huge demand for software in the world. There’s a huge demand for workers in the programming industry. Up to until recently, a bootcamp could give one access to some entry-level positions there, from which ambitious ones could rank up higher and higher, while others could just coast, producing mass cruft. The promotion-driven-development phenomenon started with this. And that’s how we get to people that get promoted in leadership positions who then say that product X has too many tests, tests fail only once, tests take too much to compile, so let’s just delete them all as they’re useless (yes, I know someone who said that some half a year ago, when I first drafted this rant). Or, a more recent example, that’s how you get to having to select a checkbox for every possible language in the world to disable automatic dubbing of videos to your preferred language. And you have to do these O(200) clicks on every device – and hope that the UI is supported on all devices you use –, while also praying that there is no UI bug that will make the settings not stick, so you’d have to perform the same useless actions again. But a PM decided that they needed to ram through this feature, so here we are, no global opt-out, just perform this useless action, countless of times.

Decades ago, programming used to be seen as an art, people were taking pride in what they were doing. Now, it’s just a factory to produce IKEA-like artifacts, advance in career, move to another team, and let someone else handle the fallout. Very few take pride in the craft, and they are pushed to only do what they love outside of the working hours – provided they jump through all the hoops that are required to get approval to do so; in many parts of the world, once you sign a job offer you rent your brain to the company, anything you produce belongs to the company.

Programmers that care about the craft should still take pride in their work, make it the best. Sure, time to market, hitting delivery estimates, are all things that matter. But, at the same time, shipping slop just makes the world worse for everyone.

Maybe I’m ranting too much, so let’s just cut the rest of the draft short and stop here. I’ll push the discussion about AI to a separate article.