Simplicity always wins – Bruno Oliveira – Web Developer from Somewhere

Software engineers love complexity. Complexity is an inherent part of writing software because the medium itself (programming languages) is complex on its own. When you put together with it the discipline of doing software engineering, where you add time constraints, customers, budgets and changing requirements… well… it’s complicated.

Some of the technologies are in fact, so complex, that some job postings require decades of dedicated full-time experience with the technology to simply be considered qualified enough to apply - C++ game develoment, embedded systems and some financial trading firms come to mind, to name a few. All of this just adds to the complexity of our daily craft, and, while in recent years, the accessibility to get new people into the field has been praised for “making it so easy to get started”, I believe that is actually harmful for the industry in the long run, and reasons are twofold:

first, ease of accessibility can’t be a synonym for “ease of becoming a professional”. There is a big difference between cobbling together a few tutorials and attending a coding bootcamp and becoming a professional software developer whose code a certain business or client will directly or indirectly depend on. This is the biggest misconception prevalent in today’s industry, sadly spread on podcast platforms and social media by a few people who somehow got “an audience” after attending a coding bootcamp or starting a podcast and spread their journeys like gospel. Don’t be fooled. There is much more to the craft than having a successful podcast or having completed a few JS bootcamps. Heck, there’s more to the craft than simply working on the web side of it.

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