The Insanity of Being a Software Engineer

The Insanity of Being a Software Engineer 06/04/2025 Is something I think about often because I can’t help but wonder if most other jobs are like this. Being a software engineer is tough. You need to know a couple of programming languages and tools right from the get-go. But that won’t cut it. Companies expect you to know whatever particular framework they use. That might be Rails or Django or Laravel or something else. You’ll also need CSS. It’ll take you a lifetime to learn — and you still won’t know why the layout’s breaking — but knowing just enough to get by is feasible. It’s unlikely that you won’t have to deal with JavaScript. Maybe you’re lucky and you just need to sprinkle in the occasional jQuery in the legacy app you’re maintaining. But things change. At some point, the people at Facebook built React. Turns out that company with tens of thousands of engineers had two specialties all along: front-end and back-end. The programming hive-mind collectively decides that React ... Read full article.