Why do solo game developers tend to get into fights with big tech engineers? Why do high-profile external hires to large companies often fizzle out? Why is AI-assisted development amazing for some engineers and completely useless for others?
I think it’s because some engineers are doing very different kinds of work to other engineers. Those two types of engineers often assume their counterparts are simply incompetent, but they’re really just working in different fields.
Pure and impure engineering
There are two very different kinds of programming work. The first kind - pure engineering - is interested in solving a technical problem as perfectly as possible. Open-source work is often like this: some engineer wants to write the best HTTP requests library, or their ideal game engine. The second kind - impure engineering - is interested in solving a real-world problem as efficiently as possible. Paid tech company work is often like this: engineers are asked to deliver some project or feature as well as they can do it by the deadline.
In pure software engineering, what you’re doing is close to art or research. It’s close to art because the engineer is driven by an aesthetic sense (e.g. of what makes a good library or game engine). It’s close to research because it’s open-ended: once the engineer arrives at a solution, they can continue testing and tinkering forever, trying (and usually discarding) new approaches.
Impure software engineering is more like plumbing or construction. The engineer’s aesthetic sense is subordinated to someone else’s (usually their employer’s) needs. They’re building a solution to someone else’s problem. And since it’s someone else’s problem, it has to actually be finished to schedule, which means compromising.
If you’ve spent any time reading my posts, you’ll know what kind of work I spend most of my time on: the impure kind of work. I am pragmatic to a fault. But I do have a lot of respect for pure work. I come from a background in academic philosophy, which (along with mathematics) is pretty similar to pure engineering.
Pure engineering is less important in the 2020s
This pure/impure distinction has been obscured by the fact that there used to be much more scope for pure engineering at large tech companies. In the 2010s, times were different. Companies were driven almost entirely by hype, and they were hiring more engineers than they knew what to do with. Funding pure engineering projects solved both of those problems: it produced impressive open-source artifacts that made the company look good to prospective engineering hires, and it provided a bottomless pit of useful-looking work for those engineers to do.
Even impure engineering got colonized by pure engineering. Companies burned hundreds of thousands of engineer-hours migrating from monoliths to microservices, or from HTTP service calls to event-sourced architecture, or from event-sourced architecture to full CQRS, and so on. A lot of very skilled engineers found their niche in navigating these hard, technical projects.
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