Working in a startup environment for almost a decade has given me privileged access to a fast-paced... Tagged with programming, productivity, career, learning.

Denis Bolkovskis

Anthropic

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Being a good software engineer is harder than ever due to the evolving tech market, competition, and constant temptations. It's important to focus on bringing value, avoid falling into hype, and strive for positive stress. Building a supportive workplace culture and optimizing for the long term can lead to better outcomes.

Unpopular Opinion: It’s harder than ever to be a good software engineer

Nice article!
My 2 cents: It is not just about the profession, but also about the broader context we are inserted into. I started my career in 2006, and we had a lot of technologies, patterns (like SOAP, RESTful), languages and frameworks (c, c++, vb, java, lisp, delphi, .net, etc.) - things were already boiling and bubbling up, social media was starting, we had to learn how to use smartphones, the list just goes on.
But it was a time of hope. We hoped that all this change would gave us a better, deeply humane and interconnected world. Instead of it, much of these powers were used to build some irrelevant things, like marketing (google, amazon and all digital marketing bullsh1t). A big deal of those powers were use to do bad things - to build inhumane social echo chambers which are day by day undermining our human values, destroying free and independent press, transforming our lives into a noisy treacherous sometimes hopeless adventure, by effectively deconstructing reality around us.
The software engineer nowadays have to keep working while he faces the cruel state of big sh1t in which we are, knowingly that we share a chunk of responsibility for constructing without questioning, on the last 20 years, the basis for the deconstruction of humanity’s social fabric.

Doing anything just for the money is never gonna be sustainable. Work building things for non-profits/ ethical businesses that are helping people and the workplace culture is automatically going to be better. Knowing you’re contributing to something positive rather than just helping to sell more crap to people is better for your mental health period.

Really good read! Thanks for this!

This unpopular opinion seems rather popular. Nice to see it written and shared though.