Are Software Engineers Ruling the World?

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Our digital world is software, created and built by software engineers. If the software stops, the world stops. That’s software power. Can they take it down — or abuse it? Of course. It happens all the time … and it’s getting worse.

Major strikes remind us of the obvious: No actors and writers, no movies. No dock workers, no loading and unloading. No bus drivers … — and so on. Their importance in our lives vary, but none of them stop the world. Just like ‘no software engineers, no software’, right? Wrong. Software runs the world in ways never seen before. Stop key software products and the world stops. Almost like sucking the air out of the room — or the atmosphere. Everything stops. That’s power.

Of course it’s not that simple, but it’s an important line of thought. Our digital world is enabled by and totally dependent on software — and thus on software engineers and their ‘professional relatives’, data scientists and a few others: Architects, developers, designers, testers, cleaners, etc. They literally keep the world running — and moving ahead. They are the enablers of and custodians of AI/LLMs etc. And they can stop it — just as literally. Maybe not one or two but it doesn’t take more than a handful of collaborating specialists to stop a country — or even a continent.

That’s how exposed we are — and that’s the power they have. Of course there are mechanisms in place to ensure it cannot happen. They are good and constantly improving but they’re not perfect. We’ve seen the Internet go down in parts of the world because of accidental misconfigurations. We’ve seen ‘terrorists’ lock down entire cities. And we’re seeing successful ransomware attacks all over the world almost daily — enabled by software weaknesses, bad design and sloppiness. By software specialists and -companies.

That’s exposure on the one hand and power on the other. Deep knowledge about how our digital world works at the lower levels, about the technologies and tools that keep our systems going, is an extremely powerful and valuable possession.

Having such power is also tempting. Small and untraceable changes here and there, deep down in a system, may deliver dramatic results higher up — and never be caught. Which means that the moral compass of individuals is more important than ever…