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Thoughts on the software industry (2022)


meone asked me via email about my thoughts on the software engineering field, and what I would tell someone new to the industry. (Relatively speaking, I’m also pretty new to the industry! But it’s 5AM, and I ended up going on a long semi-rant.

Look one way, and it’s a set of tools for solving problems using computers, which are these interesting arrangements of wires we taught to mimic this ideal model of information processing. I’ve found that looking at the software field through this lens (asking myself how it models the world, and our role in it) helps me understand it deeper than when I look at it as just a community of people building programs and tools. Everything else — tools, frameworks, languages, patterns — are downstream of this grand challenge: programs like Google are giant, lumbering machines of colossal complexity.

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