The Insanity of Being a Software Engineer - Prime Reacts

Prime confuses an electrician with an electrical engineer.

As an electrician who has a computer science degree. Using binary search to find a ground fault in a fire alarm system is quite handy.

The reason software is worse now than back in the 80's is because it has grown more complex, but instead of having experts in one area, one guy is supposed to have a mid-level grasp of everything. Like me. I know C# very well, but I am only a noob at cloud architecture, front-end stuff, DevOps and networking. But I am the final authority (and I get blamed) for everything. It's a lot of responsibility for one guy. I can't specialise in everything. That's literally the opposite of a specialist.

Modern CSS is easy. I remember back in the day if you wanted a simple box with round corners you had to create a 3x3 html table, export 4 gifs for each corner, use 1x1 pixel transparent gifs for empty spaces and struggle with ie6 and Netscape rendering quirks. Fun times.

" you'll also need CSS. It'll take you a lifetime to learn " The publisher should have at least have read his post once again to understand this sounds hilarious

"of being a software engineer". immediately descends into webdev-only world

I have been doing this programming thing professionally for 60% of my whole life and 100% of my adult life. 29 years in total. A couple of years ago, my bosses suggested that I "grow" into a manager position. The idea of spending my whole day in meetings talking to other managers didn't sound productive. I politely declined. I probably left some money on the table, but you cant put a price on mental health and professional fulfillment. One thing I have noticed is that those engineers that went into management lost most of their skills in a matter of a couple of years.

Totally feel that. I just got thrown into a WooCommerce WordPress project—haven’t touched WordPress in like 5 to 10 years and remember exactly nothing. But hey, one of the directors at the consulting firm I work for pitched me as a senior software engineer. Apparently that means I should have every framework I’ve ever touched stored in long-term memory, ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. Sure, no problem, let me just re-download 2012-me.

If you pause at 1:49 it looks like prime drew a Picasso-esque style face. Bravo sir.

"software engineering is so much harder than other jobs" - quote by someone who never worked in any other area in their life.