An image quilt from Edward Tufte. I built an editor for your own here

So You Get Paid to Type?

Software engineers have a bit of mystique that other professions don’t¹. We can see the results of a engineer, lawyer, or doctor and even if we don’t fully understand how they get them.

But software engineers do like, math? Well probably not math, but maybe math to a first approximation. Something involving code maybe?

Software engineering actually has very little to do with code. Code is a means to an end. Software engineers model problems at some level of abstraction and express those abstractions as code. That’s the core of the job.².

The format of that software, how it’s written or whatever, is obviously the source of endless professional debate. Sometimes there are real world consequences for choosing incorrectly, but at the end of the day they’re just details. It’s like arguing what kind of paper or ink makes the best maps. Shop talk that people confuse as important parts of the job.

A map maker’s core competency is understanding what abstraction should be displayed and how. A software engineer’s is the same, pick and choose the right abstractions and your life is easy. The wrong ones are you’re going to create a flying spaghetti monster.³

This makes managing them very difficult for the median businessperson.

If I were an MBA

Businesspeople really love factories.

If you’re a businessperson you really want to make everything seem like a factory. Your workers are factories that take input, money, your mission statement, pizza parties, and some raw materials, laptops, desks, and produce some output, edited videos, powerpoints, “deals”.

Honestly, the factory abstraction is quite good. Inputs and outputs are quantifiable, now optimizable, factories are composable with other factories, and they have a consistent relationship between input and output.⁴ If you mine copper in your own copper mine or contract for copper with a different mine it doesn’t matter. One can still feed into the other.

The whole point of business, at least big business, is to finance, organize and optimize these factories to produce products people want/need at a profit.

Software engineers in the 80/90s had to deal with this, and it was terrible for a lot of reasons. The industry has mostly moved from structured planning to a focus on iteration speed. Iterations work so well because they check the abstraction against reality repeatedly, instead of all at once on delivery.

New Devs

Lemme riff a bit.

There’s a lot of stress in the tech industry right now. Especially amongst software engineers.

If you joined the industry in ~2021 I feel bad. I really doubt things will be that good for the median person in the industry, engineer or not, for a while, if ever. If it makes you feel any better it was almost never that good in my living memory. Maybe 2001 was great I dunno, I wasn’t there.

Do you know what kind of labor market distortions it takes for Amazon to be one of the leaders in total compensation? The piss bottle guys were making promises to become “Earth’s Greatest Employer”.

So we had a correction in tech jobs in 2022-23. Not a huge surprise to me. A lot of people who came into the field did it because it seemed like an easy paycheck and left when they realized it was not as easy anymore.

Fair enough, noone is entitled to a six figure software engineering job.

But even today for the gainfully employed, there’s this pervasive nihilism I can never remember in the history of the industry. Layoffs, soft layoffs (RTO), and the feeling that what you’re doing does not really matter since these companies are so large that everyone is forcused on gaming perf for bonuses.

Much of this has to do with AI marketing hype⁵ and the Elon Musk school of business where you fake it on Twitter till you make it. There’s also the fact that every young person these days is depressed which is definitely contributing. The fixes for that are bigger than the tech industry.

If you’re feeling this way, I want you to know, or remember, that there was a time when the tech industry was actually, truly, optimistic. You know Google’s motto when they built the behemoth was “Don’t be Evil” right? Imagine going from a pre-iPhone world to a post-iPhone world. That was a step change in human capability.

The goal was to build more of those, not just game capitalism or the org chart.

Maybe one day AI will be that step change. From listening to people who trying to build it, it’s going to be a slow takeoff or even AI winter #3.⁶

This profession will only die when people can model the world themselves, or we run out of levels of abstraction. I doubt that’s happening anytime soon.

For now, just make sure that you’re here for the love of the game and that you know ball.

Everything else will balance out, I’m sure of that.

- Chris

Footnotes

1. I used to get asked all the time how to “get into tech”. That stopped when the layoffs started. ↩

2. There was a time in the 2010s where every intro to programming tutorial was styled as a “magician” who makes “spells”. This is silly. If we were we wouldn’t need money. ↩

3. This system is usually one that touches Oracle, and will forever make Larry Ellision money to build his questionable projects. ↩

4. Yes, MBA curriculum rediscovered functional programming in the most cursed way possible. ↩

5. AI tools are useful sometimes, blah blah, you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t then the bubble popped or we’re in some Scifi drea/hellscape. ↩

6. Unless I need to fundraise, of course, email is on the homepage. ;) ↩