Software Engineering Is Cool, But Is It Interesting? | Ertu's Blog<br>Software engineering has always had a strange reputation. From the outside, it looks extremely cool. Tell someone you are a<br>software developer and, if they are not in tech, there is often a small moment of admiration. You can almost see them imagining<br>green text scrolling across a black screen while you break into a satellite. For a long time, I probably believed some version of<br>this too.<br>But the longer I work in software, the less cool the actual job seems to me. I should be careful here. Software is still a great<br>profession. It is difficult in a way that is hard to explain to people outside it. You can spend twenty years getting good at it<br>and still regularly discover things that make you feel like a beginner. So I am not saying the job is easy. I am saying something<br>slightly different. I am not sure it is that interesting. At least not compared with some other professions.<br>Imagine meeting someone at a party.<br>Eventually you get to the standard question: “So, what do you do?”<br>You say you are a software<br>developer.<br>They become curious. “What do you build?” “What language do you use?” “Can you hack things?”<br>Maybe, if they are<br>ambitious: “Is AI going to replace you?” And then something interesting happens. The conversation runs out of road.<br>Because the moment you start answering the questions properly, you have a problem. You mention databases. Then APIs. Then<br>concurrency. Then distributed systems, and suddenly you can see the other person’s soul slowly leaving their body. You have not<br>become boring. You have simply crossed the technical border. From that point on, every honest answer requires another five-minute<br>explanation.<br>Now compare this with meeting a doctor. If someone told me they were an emergency room doctor, I could probably ruin their<br>evening with questions. What is the strangest thing you have seen? Have you ever known immediately that someone was lying about<br>how they got injured? What happens when two family members disagree about a patient? Have you ever saved someone you thought was<br>going to die? What is the saddest case you still remember? I could keep going for hours.<br>And the reason is obvious. Their work is full of people. Every patient arrives with a life attached to them. A different family.<br>A different personality. A different mistake. A different piece of bad luck. Sometimes the doctor becomes part of that person’s<br>story for twenty minutes. Sometimes for months, and sometimes the story stays with them forever.<br>Software has stories too, of course. We have production disasters. Companies collapsing. Terrible managers. Brilliant engineers.<br>Impossible deadlines. Databases accidentally deleted on Friday afternoons. There are scandals, failures, bizarre customers,<br>heroic debugging sessions and codebases that seem to have been written by someone experiencing a personal crisis. But there is<br>still a problem. Most days are not like that. Most days are Tuesday.<br>You open your laptop. You check Slack. You join a meeting. You move a ticket from one column to another. You spend forty minutes<br>discovering that the bug was caused by one line of code. You fix it. You open Slack again. Lunch. Another meeting. Someone says,<br>“Let’s take this offline.” Nobody takes it offline. The day ends. Tomorrow will contain suspiciously similar events.<br>Of course every profession has repetition. A surgeon does not discover a new organ every Wednesday. But software seems unusually<br>good at producing days that blur into one another.<br>Now think about a taxi driver. I would genuinely like to sit with an experienced taxi driver and hear about their job. Especially<br>someone who has driven nights for twenty years. Imagine what has happened in that back seat. Drunk people. Thieves. Sex workers.<br>Couples fighting. People going to funerals. People coming back from weddings. Someone getting the best news of their life.<br>Someone getting the worst. A person who gets into the car, says one strange sentence, and is remembered by the driver fifteen<br>years later.<br>If you put me and that taxi driver at the same table and asked both of us to describe an average week at work, I know whose<br>stories I would want to hear first.<br>Take a more unusual profession. Suppose you meet an actual member of the mafia and, for some reason, you are allowed to ask as many questions as you want. My God. Even with that permission, they would probably have to throw me into the bottom of the Pacific by the time I was done. Who wouldn’t want to know what an ordinary day in the life of a real mobster looks like? Fuck the programmer.<br>And yet there is a funny exception. Every once in a while, I meet a software developer who has been doing this for decades. They<br>worked on weird systems. They survived companies that almost collapsed. They shipped things when computers were slower than<br>today’s watches. They have...