// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Goodbye to the Hard Parts That Never Mattered
I read Dave Kiss's eulogy for the software
engineer and kept
coming back to one question.
Shitty regex? Writing another one-off parser for terrible data? Memorizing some
weird syntax for no obvious reason? Losing an afternoon to the particular
incantation a build system expects before it will do the thing you already
understand?
If that is what died, I am not sure it needs a funeral.
Dave's argument is more hopeful than the title suggests. By the end, he opens
the casket back up. The skills are still ours. The engineer is still responsible
for what ships. Maybe, he writes, we put the wrong name on the headstone.
I agree with most of that. I just do not think we need the headstone at all.
This does not feel like the death of the software engineer to me. It feels like
a rebirth.
Software engineering has always contained a lot of work that is only loosely
related to the problem being solved.
You need to move a small pile of ugly data from one system to another, so you
spend half a day learning the edge cases of a CSV parser. You know exactly what
a service should do, but first you have to remember the syntax for a framework
you have not touched in six months. You understand the bug, but the fix is
buried behind an unfamiliar repository layout, three layers of indirection, and
a test command nobody wrote down.
We got good at this work because we had to. Some of it was even fun. There is a
real satisfaction in finally landing the regex or finding the one line that
made the whole system behave strangely.
Most of this was a toll we paid between understanding a problem and changing
the system. It was never the destination. If an agent can take care of more of
that translation, I have not become less of an engineer. I have more time for
the part that required an engineer in the first place.