Step Aside engineers. For the time of plumbers has come
I remember watching the movie “The last Samurai” that depicted the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877. The movie showed the lives of Japanese Samurai and their defeat as they fought the machines guns of Japanese Imperial Army with their swords. The final scene pictured a merciless gunning down of Samurai, from a distance, as they try to charge against the Japanese Imperial Army.
I was moved by the discipline, the honour and the courage of the Samurai. But even I knew that they stood no chance against the machine guns. It was kind of stupid to fight against such army and that in open fields. But I guess they cared more about their tradition and methods than the actual outcome of the war. The outcome was death.
I have seen this repeated. Making steel used to be considered an art form until Andrew Carnegie came along and standardised the process. By 1900 USA surpassed Britain in steel production, production efficiency skyrocketed while the hourly wages of the steel factory workers dropped precipitously. You couldn’t compete with semi-skilled workers producing standardised steel in mills irrespective of how skilled or hard working steel artisan you might be.
The same is happening with development of SaaS applications. Most of the SaaS applications can be described as “Less than 100 CRUD web and mobile screens”. One can build reasonable good quality of front end with RAD (Rapid Application Development) tools. The backend is all take care by the high level hosted managed infrastructure modules provided by Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Infrastructure as these services are quickly moving upstream by offering databases, API gateways, Analytics services compute services, security services and others. Ten years back, If you were running
a large technology company, you needed real engineers to build systems to handle scale. Today you click and deploy.
You no longer need engineers to build backend or front-end systems for SaaS applications. You need Software plumbers to stitch modules together and architects to organise such modules. Actually you would do more harm than good to try to build these modules for yourself. Self-made artisan components can not compete in cost or quality with such mass produced components.
This may sound all gloom and doom for the software engineers but it is not. Technology is constantly destroying jobs and automating those tasks, freeing the real artisans from the chores of building and running applications. A small team of architects can deploy large scale systems today and make real impact in the lives of people. Engineer if becomes architect, can be super powerful today. They do not have to spend hours teaching, managing and reviewing the code of junior engineers.
Simplifying the technology systems to the level of stitching together modules is also making software application development accessible to the masses. It has liberated the art of building such applications from the sole privilege of Silicon Valley engineers, who are working in Facebook, Google and other other cool silicon valley startups. It has democratised the power. The technology is eating the world. If the world is to see the full power of software: big data, AI and robotics can do to our services, manufacturing and agriculture industries, building software can not be the sole privileges of Silicon Valley elite.
As I travelled in India, I lived in AirBnB apartments, ordered food on Swiggy and used Ola to travel around. When I get bored, I used TikTok rather than Youtube. I booked train tickets on Ixigo and read news on Dailyhunt. These have millions of users. Life has become simpler for these people. This is possible because one can build large parts of these software systems with plumbing rather than engineering.
I ruminate about the days of handcrafted CGI scripts written on servers. Those read like poetries. It required discipline, intelligence and an innate sense of beauty and I respected the craft. But I know that time is over now. It is best to keep that as hobby. Long live software plumbing.
