I dislike engineers in general because most of them think like this. they have gone all in on embracing alienation in the marxist sense from their own work product and dont understand people who feel a sense of personal craft and ownership in something.
Imagine if you are making a painting and someone comes along and starts doodling in the corner, or squirting different colors onto your palette. it really f-s up what you are trying to do as an artist and craftsperson.
engineers who are craftspeople cannot tolerate this. but in modern corporate it is expected. engineers who are NOT craftspeople dont care. they are perfect, formless globs of soullness grey goo.
oh management randomly cancelled the project you were working on for three years? shrugs. ok, what other toilet do you want me to clean.
This author is that - a robot. A replaceable machined part. management and capitalism love this guy and people like him. they can interview someone else and relace him tomorrow with another grey goo hire that will not complain.
You dislike engineers because they are acting like engineers instead of artists? The typical engineer is a paid mercenary, working to get widget 2.0 out the door. They are not robots, but are paid to play nice with others to advance their employer's interests. To act like a temperamental artiste in that environment would be immature and unprofessional.
To me, that reads as a bit immature, and there were times when I felt exactly like what you described, but switched one project to another and I felt embarrassed from my own past behaviour.
I'm getting paid to build someone else's project. I enjoy the work I'm making so I build it the best I can given the time constraints. I'm a paid worker, not an artists. Every entropy that I add to this system, is entropy that delays capital income to the whole company, so that entropy needs to be productive and not fundamentalist following unnecessary perfectionism. If something can be done quickly but imperfectly and still be relatively well maintained with manageable debt, so be it, that's what delivers the most value to the whole company. It's a bit one sided if I banged by foot no the ground and said "no, this will take 6 more months that what you want because I want it to be done in my perfect way". And this idea of perfectionism crumbles even more when you realise your idea of perfect is not objective. There's always someone else who has a better and more perfect idea than yours.
This doesn't conflict with the programming I do on my personal projects. Personal projects give me more satisfaction than what I do at work, but personal projects don't give me any money, as it should be, or I'd be compelled to work faster.
My work is not a craft, and that's fine. I'm just another human helping other humans advancing the company to acquire more money. I respect and understand my boss's incentives to get more money and they respect my needs to build maintainable software. So, more often than not, we meet in the middle. Sometimes more toward my view, other times towards theirs.
An artist making a painting owns the IP of the painting[1]. A software engineer working for an employer generally does not; the employer (or client) usually owns the IP, and usually has a larger financial stake in the software than any individual.
I think this attitude is fine if you are the sole stakeholder and IP owner (e.g. a personal project or a small business you own). But not for something you are building in collaboration with other engineers for someone else's ownership.
[1] Artists do often make works for client IP, in which cases, they also do not have full creative control of their output!
That's really not true. You can have complete ownership of your creative process even if you work toward a brief/goal specified by someone else.
I say this as someone who has edited movie trailers for major motion pictures for 20 years. I have always been able to accomplish my own goals and by whatever means and processes I deemed important and necessary for myself, despite still needing to satisfy the client's objectives.
You do not need to give up your autonomy. The fact that you think so is troubling and speaks to a split in your psyche.
Congratulations and count yourself among the lucky. But if you cannot appreciate that things will not be that way for many employment situations then you don't know how lucky you are.
It's not a matter of luck, it's a function of the degree to which one's psyche is fragmented.
The default in my industry is exactly as you describe. The only reason it isn't so for me is because I refused to give over my autonomy and have remained in touch with my intrinsic motivations. The job/role/industry is irrelevant as far as causation, I'm just mentioning mine for context.
Almost every painting you've ever heard of has been commissioned and paid for. If I'm painting the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, for money, and my coworker is fucking up his part, I'm going to be pissed yes. We're supposed to do this 40 hours per week and not care about the output quality? That seems less healthy/ideal than the alternative.
There is a wide gulf between not caring about your work at all and getting angry about it. Plenty of us care about our work and the projects we own, we want them to be solid and will stand up to defend them. None of that requires getting angry about it.
There's even levels to anger, and I don't think this author is referring to venting annoyance or expressing politely to someone that they did something wrong. "Oh management randomly cancelled the project you were working on for three years" anyone would get annoyed by that, it's only human. There are plenty of ways people express annoyance. Throwing a fit over it and screaming at your boss or coworkers is just dumb.
(Yes, of course I'd get mad if someone started doodling in the corner of my painting. I'd also get mad if a coworker went on my computer and deleted files at random. These are contrived scenarios that don't apply to 99.9% of regular office work.)
I often hear stories from more toxic workplaces about engineers yelling during meetings, insulting and degrading each other, etc. That's the kind of anger that's unproductive and largely unwarranted unless you're literally working on a life-or-death scenario (which some engineers are, but the vast majority are not).
And that's really what it comes down to. For the overwhelming majority of software projects, it's just not that deep. You mention "artists and craftspeople" but even for them, it's really not that deep. Artists and craftspeople go through tons of abuse, annoying clients, etc. and they don't respond to it by flipping their shit and getting mad. At the end of the day it's just a job, we can value it, but it's almost certainly not important enough to be worth getting angry about.
>>> I dislike engineers in general because most of them think like this. they have gone all in on embracing alienation in the marxist sense from their own work product and dont understand people who feel a sense of personal craft and ownership in something.
What? This is a very confusing statement...
The word engineer does not refer to only software engineers. And even if it did, I've never met an engineer who thought of their professional work as art. Are you sure you dislike engineers in general? 'Cause that's a pretty big group you just generalized about.
Have you not heard the classic joke? The optimist sees the glass as half-full. The pessimist: half-empty. The engineer sees the glass as twice as big as it needs to be.
This is the essence of engineering - solving problems safely, efficiently and economically.
Many engineers are craftspeople and artists. What makes you think they can't separate their professional duties from their other interests?
1. The tech companies knew an H1B price change was coming
2. They offshored and front-loaded their H1B hiring
3. AI means much smaller teams, they will just hire 01
The damage has been done, American workers are just bag holders.
Most companies began opening offices abroad with P/L and roadmap ownership responsibilities during the initial Covid layoffs, because the first employees cut were those on work visas. Despite the stereotypes on this forum, this included a lot of PMs, EMs, and Principal Engineers.
When companies began rehiring during the COVID recovery, they began rehiring these former employees, but giving them a significant salary premium while allowing them to open and manage entire offices abroad. On top of that, CEE, Israel, and India all give massive subsidizes and roll the red carpet for companies to open high headcount offices which made it easier to do this move.
Now in 2025, you can see the 75th percentile of TCs in India and Romania in the $50k-60k mark and the 90th percentile breaking the $75k-85k mark, so it's not only cheap back office work.
I ran into a guy making double six figures for like the last 7 years at a known public tech company. He was literally doing the most basic DevOps (Terraform). Nothing fancy. Zero ability to program. No willingness or desire to learn programming. He was an H1B. That blew me away. How is it possible that you have a guy in the US for 10 years who never bothered learning to code doing a 200K / year job. The abuse of H1B is crazy. He told me he had "tried to find a job" but "they all require programming." I am not even a tech background and I have learned to program. Completely insane imo. This was stuff you could teach a highschool student, no degree required.
as a long-time programmer, sysadmin/sre/devops is a whole different mindset and skillset. i would be neither willing nor able to do that guy's job; i don't fault him for not wanting to do mine. clearly since he keeps being paid his $200k/year he is delivering a lot more than $200k worth of stability and uptime to the company, no coding required.
That doesn't explain why it's abuse, though. How does the company benefit by paying this foreigner $200k + benefits + immigration fees/legal bills compared to hiring a US citizen? Abuse is e.g. bringing in cheap foreign labor at below US market rate. This is not that.
fwiw, which is nothing. If I saw one of my employees write lazy slacker nonsense like this, I'd fire them. I read some of your other posts in this thread, perhaps the issues with the world are closer to you than you realize?
That seems needlessly antagonistic on your part. I'm not advocating for his way of doing things, but the person described has clearly decided it's more in his economic interest to maintain a comfortable fiefdom than to engineer himself out of it. Having automated myself out of a few jobs in the past without much of a reward, I can't say his actions are irrational.
Imagine if you are making a painting and someone comes along and starts doodling in the corner, or squirting different colors onto your palette. it really f-s up what you are trying to do as an artist and craftsperson.
engineers who are craftspeople cannot tolerate this. but in modern corporate it is expected. engineers who are NOT craftspeople dont care. they are perfect, formless globs of soullness grey goo.
oh management randomly cancelled the project you were working on for three years? shrugs. ok, what other toilet do you want me to clean.
This author is that - a robot. A replaceable machined part. management and capitalism love this guy and people like him. they can interview someone else and relace him tomorrow with another grey goo hire that will not complain.
im not for it.