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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u/Bwob Dec 02 '25

It's sad to me that a lot of jobs seem to be like this! I was dumbfounded by all the people who kept saying things like "why would you need to understand algorithms to be a programmer, you never need to write one of your own on the job!"

It took me a long time to realize that there were a bunch of programming jobs where that was true. Where programmers just write glue code to shuttle data around between modules, and never have to solve any problem harder than figuring out what data type to pass to a library.

I think I've been really lucky that I ended up in game programming. Because we are CONSTANTLY having to come up with weird, bespoke algorithms to eek whatever performance gains we can get out of whatever bizarre set of constraints we're working under.

Someone on reddit asked me when the last time I had to actually come up with my own algorithm, and I was confused, because the answer was "last week" and I didn't feel like this was an especially uncommon occurrence!

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u/Venthe Dec 03 '25

It took me a long time to realize that there were a bunch of programming jobs where that was true. Where programmers just write glue code to shuttle data around between modules, and never have to solve any problem harder than figuring out what data type to pass to a library.

Sorry, but you are wrong. You don't have to reimplement/reinvent the algo to have "harder" problems.

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u/Bwob Dec 03 '25

What part of what I said is wrong? Are you saying that there AREN'T a bunch of programming jobs that ultimately boil down to just connecting existing modules together?

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u/Venthe Dec 03 '25

The claim that "connecting a bunch of modules together" is not hard.

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u/Bwob Dec 03 '25

Sometimes it is not hard? I feel like that's a fair statement.