| > As software developers, it’s easy to overlook the privileges we enjoy. We have the unique ability to delve deep into intricate processes, monitor real-time activities, log what’s happening, and even pause time with a debugger. This remarkable capability is not only cheap but fast, bordering on thoughtless. > While many other professions struggle to understand and resolve their issues, we have the advantage of being able to experiment multiple times a day with just a few clicks. So much strained positivity, as if the author was tasked to find something to be thankful for. Look, software engineering is a great job if you enjoy the work. But even in this parable, the problem is the author's week of distress and flailing. It has nothing to do with the work and everything to do with the author. All the others he turns towards, no matter their discipline, their tools for investigation, or the constraints they faced in a dilemma, relate stories where they have a mature understanding of how their industry works and how they navigate its system. They encounter problems in the course of their work and they resolve them in the course of their work. Maybe it takes a little while to proceed with diagnosis. Maybe it takes a long while to integrate improvements into a later product. Maybe they need to forgo some procedure that they prefer to use. By the authors account, the embedded engineer, the hardware engineer, the CEO and veterinarian all face greater challenges when solving problems in their work, yet they all speak of their road through those challenges with a confidence that the author lacks. They try to soothe the author and empathize, but none of their stories hint at a week of panicked flailing. So if they handle their work so much more confidently, is it true that their dilemmas are worse and that the author is lucky to be a software engineer? If the author listened to their own invented characters, the realization to come to is not that the author is lucky to work in a field with purported "privileges" and that everyone else has it worse (gross!), but that everyone faces dilemmas in their work and that the real skill is in staying cool and confidently relying on the processes of their discipline. And this has everything to do with the person doing the work and nothing to do with the discipline. The realization is that challenges arise in all professions and that you can proceed through them without distress and flailing if you allow yourself patience and confidence. It's funny because they wrote this as a parable, but they missed the real lesson in the very piece they wrote. Four people reassure them that "We've been there! We all go through this!" and their takeaway is "I need to remember that I'm lucky and that everybody else has it even worse." |