Career

What I write about here ​

The posts under this tag are about the job rather than the code. What happens to a career in software when the part that used to take the longest stopped taking long.

The thread running through them is that the change has not been evenly distributed. Typing got cheap. Deciding what to type did not, and neither did reading code you did not write, holding the context nobody wrote down, or being the person who can tell that something plausible is wrong. Those were always the senior half of the work. They are now most of it, which is fine for people who already have them and a real problem for anyone who was going to acquire them by doing the cheap half for a few years.

That is the junior question, and it gets several posts here because it is the one I find genuinely difficult. The pipeline that produced experienced engineers ran through work that is now automated. Nobody has proposed a replacement that survives contact with a budget.

The rest is practical. What is still worth learning first. Which tasks I still do by hand and why. How estimation changes when the typing was never the expensive part. Who is accountable when the code was generated and it goes wrong.

Read these expecting a position rather than a forecast. I do not know what this profession looks like in five years, and the posts that claim to are selling something.