A Cog In The Big Machine
How modern work paradigms can make us automatons — filled with boredom, lacking ambition, and bereft of true creativity.
A short missive on where we might be going if we don’t change course.
I’m not entirely sure if it’s a result of spending a significant proportion of my adult life in the Grand Game of Software Engineering or just a natural result of the increased cynicism as a result of aging, but I’m seriously starting to think that a lot of the challenge, fascination, and indeed fun is rapidly disappearing from the Game.
Although many people enter the industry as notional software engineers, few people enter as true computer scientists whose love of the Game comes primarily from the intellectual challenge of problem solving, wresting with concepts and algorithms, and generally just not implementing the same boring tropes over and over again.
I hope I speak for at least a few of us when I say that the Grand Game isn’t always just a means to an end. We’re here because we like to do the difficult things, to solve intriguing problems, and to get very irate about spaces, tabs, regular expressions, and how we actually feel that Visual Studio Code is more of a burden than an aid when it comes to IDEs¹.
Many view original computer scientists as essentially mathematicians, knowledgable primarily in logic…
