Engineering Gap

Software development is a lot like the record business, or the movie business. There are a bunch of promoters out there who are looking for the next big thing, hoping to make a fortune. Unfortunately, they have no idea what goes into making a hit, but somehow they manage to scrape enough money together to keep funding these development projects. Anyone who ends up working with these guys is going to suffer from unimaginable aggravation.

I used to be jealous of people who made fortunes in the software business, and to some extent I probably still am, but I never looked at it as a way to make a fortune. An easy living perhaps, but not a way to enormous wealth. I work with software because I enjoy it, and I like to think that after 30 years I am pretty good at it.

Taking the music and movie business analogy a little further, I would be a studio musician, or a bit player in a film. I am not a star. I have no idea what would appeal to the masses, and even if I did, I do not know where I could get funding for it. I know what I like, but Windows and Facebook are not it.

I read somewhere that only something like ten percent of programmers can actually program. The other ninety percent may look like programmers, and they may act like programmers, but they cannot actually write a working program. They may know all the buzzwords, and all kinds of things about software, list the names of all the libraries and their functions, cut and paste blocks of code together, do all the things it looks like programmers do, but they cannot actually write a simple program that will execute.

So here I am, an experienced software engineer who cannot find a job. Maybe I am just not looking hard enough, or maybe I am not looking in the right places, or maybe I am not looking for the right job. The better an engineer I become, the bigger the gap gets between the people who want to get something done and the people like me who could actually do it. Maybe that gap is where I should be looking. Buy what do you call that gap? Engineering management? Translation? Consulting? Counseling, maybe.