This is going to be a bitter one. Not sweet at all. Throughout my 9 years career in software engineering i have seen numerous job postings and interviews. The industry is changing, that much is obvious and inevitable and even necessary at some point. But not all changes breed improvement or yield to better results. The nature of change must be questioned, whatever the subject is. I will briefly explain my experience and observations in this field and the title will make sense in the end. There can be a lot said about the outcomes and impacts of nowadays' materialistic corporatization based logic all around the world, but i will try to stick to the software engineering side of the situation. The rest can be dug in another post.
As a software engineer i have witnessed the industry going through some major milestones over the years. We used to build desktop apps and maintain mainframes. Then web era started and the mobile requirements stormed in. These days the heavy load and scalability problems brought microservices terms and some people are trying to merge mobile development environments. We also have AI on the rise and some futurists are working on quantum computing. This is a defacto situation for a software developer. But the unusual thing is the technology in software field is changing dramatically. I have just taken you on an almost 20 years of journey right there. Dizzy yet?
If you are not, you must be in another industry rather than software development :) We are leveraging technology by building software systems on top of them. And this became an engineering field. But here comes the bitter part. I think i was kind of the last generation to use certain technologies and they have been replaced with new ones pretty quickly and irreversibly. My generation is the struggle generation because we became too old too soon. Older people were mostly able to live their lives by sticking to what they know. New generation kids already know what's going on and they already have internet and lots of opportunities. This rapid change (with the help of corporatization logic) led to tragic practices in software development. Companies became more profit based than idea or ideal based, since developing software became a mainstream profession. This is also due to the economical facts around the world, but nowadays job postings for software engineers require more than ever from the software engineers who are unaware of the technology more than ever.
Conditions in software development are growing more and more difficult and everyone knows it. This has a little bit of a supply - demand relation. One company, let's say X, wants to make money and decides to build a software as a tool. This is ok. X wants to develop the software as quick as they can and as cheap as they can. This causes a very heavy job requirement from the developer. Eventually they can't find superman and agree with someone less qualified than ideal and have to settle with it. X can very well be happy with this. BUT... Does this just stay inside X. No. Now other developers have to keep up with these nonsense requirements in order to have new possibilities to get a job, because other companies also adopt this behaviour to be able to compete in the market. This is the struggle, the race against the hype or profit based so called revolution in the software engineering field.
But why? Why are you making this expertise less and less pristine? Don't you think these days the digital infrastructures are lot more vital to your company than your whole workforce? I think i have an idea why. Because most of these companies are either incompetent or greedy. They either do not have the capability to carry out the responsibilities of a software engineer or they just want to make money as easy as they can. Software development is not exactly a corporate thing, it is a field of study. It has its own practices and ideals. This approach forces developers to be less qualified in many areas than being more qualified in a few areas. And the results from unqualified workers are always bound to fail at some point.
That brings the phase 3. The inner workings of the whole company are based on this method and it is accepted as it is. Moreover, it is preserved as it is. This is the irreversible point. Those companies has established their methods based on this faulty approach and they have to stick with it. Their software are built on top of unqualified workers and the responsible people will turn into defenders of the system. Yes, it becomes a system, a culture. A rigid, concrete, resistant and reluctant to change. Because it is way too expensive to change the mentality of the company and it always find a cheap workforce to save the day. Because unemployment forces people accept it. This will soon bring the 2nd struggle of our generation. Companies are already having hard time with economical situation in the country, they will not be able to adjust according to this nonsense speed of change. It is hype based, fueled by greed and channeled for profit. Basically unmaintainable.
Engineering, education and medicine should not be subjects of trade or corporate agendas. During the transition from a profession to business, you will definitely lose some of the essence of these areas. This results in superficial candy coated high income jobs with bitter reality behind. You have probably realized by now, the job postings have more and more lines of demands and more and more lines of the advertisement of the companies. This is the result of an uncontrolled and strange rush into new digital era from the software engineering perspective.
Oh yeah the title. I said it will make sense. I have no direct evidence or any reference for all this. These are all what i take out from my experiences and observations. But, do you really think i should prove any of these statements or show some evidence? Do you think there is a different mentality out there? Do you think software engineering is still an engineering field? Do you think it is healthy to lose the engineering part along the way and be left with just the software? To be continued...
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