During my entire development career, hell my development life, I’ve dealt with programming languages and machines that have allowed me to write less

The Death of Software Engineering

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2023-03-18 23:30:06

During my entire development career, hell my development life, I’ve dealt with programming languages and machines that have allowed me to write less-than-ideal code and get away with it. As I moved into the corporate world of development, I met your old-school developers. When I say old school, I mean COBOL developers.

You know what they say about COBOL developers: They are either retired or dead (COBOL developers start writing your nasty comments… now!). But seriously, these developers heralded the start of enterprise development and really helped build IT as an industry. So I was having a conversation with a COBOL developer and he said that when he is developing, he has to worry about every piece of memory that is being used. He said he was meticulous and could tell you every aspect of how his application interacted with the machine.

Now let’s consider for a moment that he was telling the entire truth, ignoring the usual developer boasting, and then it is pretty amazing considering what developers get to do with today’s technology. So I’ve compiled a list of things I feel developers take for granted and have taken away the engineering aspects of creating software.