A software life

Imagine you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. In each chamber, you discover clues that help you to piece together the secret code of that chamber, allowing you pass from it to the next chamber.

In this way, you progress through a large complex, one chamber at a time, having revelations and setbacks along the way.

But this never ends! There are small triumphs and defeats, but ultimately, you just keep navigating this or that set of passages forever. Frequently, you have to repeat almost exactly what you’ve done before, with minor but critical differences.

Such is a career in software engineering. It goes a little something like this:

Softwaring

The practice of creating software has changed. We used to call it programming, but now it’s software engineering.

When it was programming, it was mainly a bunch of geeky types who really got off on telling the masses about why they were formatting their email incorrectly. (Actually, in the really good old days, there were no masses using email … just the geeky types.) They worked obscenely long hours because they wanted to, and they socialized by talking about work.

Now it’s all software engineering. High tech. companies want to ease visa restrictions so they can hire cheap labor from overseas. It’s all about methodology … agile, complete with scrums and sprints, terms borrowed from the world of sports to suggest some kind of healthy teamwork. It’s all about code reviews and design patterns and best practices and quality assurance.

Basically, software has gone from being an inspired work of genius to a manufacturing process that any company can adopt to ensure that their code will be of the highest possible quality.

See how well that’s working?