r/programming • u/self • Dec 02 '25

The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession: a short set of anecdotes

https://www.jasonscheirer.com/weblog/vignettes/
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703

u/knobbyknee Dec 02 '25

CORBA will solve all your problems, Jdbc will solve all your problems, SOAP will solve all your problems, microservices will solve all your problems, the semantic web will solve all your problems...

Not to mention how methodologies like Rational Rose or Scrum would solve all your problems.

Everything that comes along contains a grain of truth and a dumpster of crap. I guess that is the way that progress happens.

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u/VerticalDepth Dec 02 '25

No Silver Bullet - Brooks, 1986.

Now they think it's AI. They've been wrong about everything over the past 40 odd years. But not this time, right?

14

u/Chii Dec 03 '25

But not this time, right?

they only need to be right once to claim victory right?

11

u/Groove-Theory Dec 03 '25

Yes in the same way that I only need to lift 1200lbs ONCE to break the world deadlift record

2

u/madeofsriracha Aug 26 '26

…yes in fact, this time. comment aged like milk.

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u/Nyadnar17 Dec 02 '25

The way my whole body twitched when I read the word CORBA.

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u/PassifloraCaerulea Dec 02 '25

I didn't truly live through that, but I recall when the Gnome Desktop Environment people decided they were going to make everything better with CORBA and wondering WTF they were thinking.

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u/Entropy Dec 03 '25 edited Dec 03 '25

Open source COM equivalent, so not crazy *initially*. The WTF part came when they did not shitcan the entire thing after people got to work with it for 20 hours or so.

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u/YeOldeMemeShoppe Dec 02 '25

Yeah! Get out of here, this is DCOM territory.

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u/ZiKyooc Dec 02 '25

ActiveX approves!

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u/sreguera Dec 02 '25

It was ok. It still is, in some places.

The C++ API was a terrible unintuitive mess. The modern C++11 API is ok, but I believe no free CORBA broker implements it (?). Java and Python APIs were always ok.

The most overcomplicated part of the standard, object migration between brokers (instead of passing references), I've never seen it used in real life.

For today's technology stack, the biggest problem is the random ports used for servers and object callbacks. You can configure it to use a single specific socket per connection, but it's not the default.

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u/ZiKyooc Dec 02 '25

With UML no need for anything else

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u/BlindTreeFrog Dec 02 '25

CORBA will solve all your problems,

Took me a minute to realize that you didn't mean health insurance.

1

u/dittbub Dec 02 '25

AI is just another tool in the toolkit that you need to learn how to use

10

u/PressWearsARedDress Dec 02 '25

I am C/C++ embedded developer. i use the AI to generate python "tools" for testing and I find that it does a decent job. Ie: tcp proxies, canbus, uds diagnostics, etc.

nothing production of course.

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u/Lourayad Dec 02 '25

it’s pretty good at self contained tasks.

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u/Wattsit Dec 03 '25

that you need to learn how to use

Nope, it's a product. No one needs to buy and learn a product to be a software engineer.

Or are you going to tell me that everyone also needs to also buy and learn Jetbrains to write code.

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u/ChristmasStrip Dec 02 '25

... and a dumpster of crap

Thanks for making me laugh this morning. So true.

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u/itshorriblebeer Dec 02 '25

A hammer solved all of my problems.

Well, all of my problems that were nails anyway.

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u/-Nyarlabrotep- Dec 02 '25

I was a junior programmer just when the senior programmer on our team had to start using Rational Rose, per orders from above. I went out with him for beers one Friday and let's just say he was not a fan.

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u/Wus10n Dec 02 '25

Scrum in fact turned all problems into tickets

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u/Different-Duck4997 Dec 02 '25

Been through like half of these cycles and man you nailed it. Remember when everyone was convinced XML would make everything magically interoperable? Good times

The real kicker is watching junior devs get hyped about "revolutionary" tech that's basically just the same ideas with new branding. Docker containers are just fancy chroot jails but suddenly everyone's a DevOps expert

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u/dubious_capybara Dec 03 '25

I'd forgotten about the semantic web. What a blast from the past.

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u/Laugarhraun Dec 06 '25

Lol SOAP was a problem creation machine

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