A series of vignettes from my childhood and early career

Summary

A short set of anecdotes, apropos of nothing. The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession When I was younger, I really liked programming! I loved the sense of accomplishment, I loved the problem solving, I loved sharing what I made with the people around me to both amuse and assist. One particularly wise adult (somewhere around 1996) took me aside and said, “You know, you’re lucky you enjoy programming, because you won’t be able to make a living on it in the future. Doing it for love over money is a good idea.” “Coding is over, with Object Oriented programming one person who is much smarter than any of us could hope to be will develop the library just once and we will all use it going forward, forever. Once a problem is solved it never needs solving again. “In 5 years there’s going to be a library of objects, like books on a bookshelf, and every software problem will be solved by business people just snapping the object libraries they need together like LEGOs. They won’t need you at all.” I thought about this advice, and how Software Engineering would be ending by the time I entered school. I realized I had not even thought about my education yet. I was in middle school. Programming was not it, though, I knew that. I’m here nearly 30 years later and software continues to pay my bills, despite everything. Open source exists, there are libraries I can use to piece things together to solve all the time. New problem sets not covered by the garden path come up all the time. Clicking the LEGOs together continues to be a hard task. Every time we fix it at one level of abstraction we operate one level higher and the world keeps turning. Whenever I’m threatened with a good time and someone proclaims “this is it for you” all that happens is my job becomes more annoying. Haven’t gotten the sweet release of extinction quite yet. The Time Computing Changed Forever and Everyone Who Didn’t Move Got Left Behind Around 1993 or so was the advent of the “Multimedia Age.” Multime...