When code gets cheap operational excellence wins. Anyone can build a greenfield demo, but it takes engineering to run a service.
You may be wondering: With all the hype about agentic coding, will we even need software engineers anymore? Yes! We'll need more.
Writing code was always the easy part of this job. The hard part was keeping your code running for the long time. Software engineering is programming over time. It's about how systems change.
Let's take no-code and spreadsheets as an example of the kind of software people say is the future – custom-built, throwaway, built by non-experts to solve specific problems.
Joe Schmoe from accounting takes 10 hours to do a thing. He's does this every week and it feels repetitive, mechanical, and boring. Joe could do the work in his sleep.
But he can't get engineering resources to build a tool. The engineers are busy building the product. No worries, Joe is a smart dude. With a little Googling, a few no-code tools, and good old spreadsheet macros he builds a tool.
Amazing.
Joe's tool is a little janky but his 10 hour weekly task now takes 1 hour! 🎉 Sure, he finds a new edge case every every week and there's constant tinkering, but he's having a lot more fun.
Time passes, the business changes, accounting rules are in constant flux, and let's never talk about timezones or daylight savings ever again. Joe is sick of this bullshit.
All he wanted was to make his job easier and now he's shackled to this stupid system. He can't go on vacation, he can't train anyone else to run this thing successfully, and it never fucking works right.
Joe can't remember the last time running his code didn't fill him with dread. He spends hours carefully making sure it all worked.
Feynman called this the computer disease.
The problem with computers is that you tinker. Automating things is fun! You might forget you don't need to 😆
The part that's not fun is running things. Providing a service. Reliably, at scale, for years on end. A service that people will hire to do their jobs.
People don't buy software, they hire a service.
You don't care how iCloud works, you just want your photos to magically show up across devices every time. You don't care about Word or Notion or gDocs, you just want to write what's on your mind, share it with others, and see their changes. And you definitely don't care how a payments network point of sale terminal and your bank talk to each other, you just want your $7 matcha latte to get you through the week.
Good software is invisible.
And that takes work. A lot of work. Because the first 90% to get a working demo is easy. It's the other 190% that matters.
- What's your uptime?
- Defect rate?
- How quickly do you recover from defects?
- Do I have to reach out or will you know before me?
- Can you own upstream dependencies?
- When a vendor misbehaves, will you notice or wait until your users complain?
- When users share ideas, how long does it take?
- How do you keep engineers from breaking each other's systems?
- Do you have systems to keep engineers moving without turning your app into a disjointed mess?
- Can you build software bigger than fits in 1 person's brain?
- When I'm in a 12 hour different timezone, your engineers are asleep, and there's a big issue ... will it be fixed before I give up?
- Can you recover from failures, yours and upstream, or does important data get lost?
- Are you keeping up with security updates?
- Will you leak all my data?
- Do I trust you?
- Can I rely on you?
- How can you be so sure?
- Will you sign a legally binding guarantee that your software works when I need it? 😉
Those are the ~~fun~~ hard engineering challenges. Writing code is easy.
Cheers,
~Swizec
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