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I used to love my job, the guy that looked forward to mondays, there was always something new to learn, I was passionate about clean code and learning new languages like Elixir. As a software engineer I thought my occupation had a special significance in this world, I saw possibility and potential of creating something so impactful on the world that it would become my legacy.

Now after 5 years I’m realising that none of this stuff really matters to the world, software engineers aren’t special and it’s evident from our salaries how valuable we are compared to other professions in sales, medicine or law. My friend who works as in customer success management makes more than me.

While some of us will be in the lucky few whose work will change the world, most of us will just be another cog in the wheel, all that matters is how many product/features you ship out, nobody gives a shit about code quality, concurrency and architecture design other than us

Comments
  • 2
    dude... screw money or whatever else goes on in this world. Programmers are the INTELLECTUAL ELITE who understands life on such a deep level mere mortals cannot even begin to comprehend.
  • 1
    @hinst We're just magicians. While that does give us some special-ness beyond the average person, I wouldn't place it on a whole other level, especially since it's basically equivalent to designing instructions for maliciously compliant pedants (who can execute the instructions very, very fast).
  • 0
    My man @abirz over here spitting straight facts.
  • 5
    One day, what we do will replace what lawyers, doctors, sales people, and many other non-creative professions do.

    This is reality, what we do is changing the world in a very profound way. Now let me get back to coding the millionth flappy bird rip off.
  • 1
    > it’s evident from our salaries how valuable we are compared to other professions

    That's an exaggeration. Compared to how little nurses (especially geriatric nurses), teachers and others earn, we are filthy rich.

    > nobody gives a shit about code quality, concurrency and architecture design other than us

    True. It's kind of funny how we try to keep our programs "pure" and shun side effects. Functional programming is particularly good at "putting a box around" those.
    Customers, on the other hand, only care about that file written or that database table updated. From their point of view they're not side effects, they're the *intended* effects.

    To me, incidentally, this split indicates that separating state and side effects from logic is the right thing to do. If you keep both "problems" separated, you can solve each in a cleaner way.
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