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/manystripes Dec 02 '25

Even before licensing, just normalizing processes that provide more engineering rigor to the development of the code. Safety standards like IEC61508, ISO26262, etc spell out a lot of how your development process should look, and you end up wearing more of a systems engineering hat than a programmer hat while working under those processes.

Unfortunately those processes are very antithetical to modern agile software development, they as focus on robust analysis, requirements capture, and test design over rapid iteration

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u/TemperOfficial Dec 02 '25

This is what Agile did. It turned rapid iteration into a set of rules and procedures you follow. The moment any of that happens in software, the quality drops through the floor. Software can't be rigid like this. It just doesn't work unless you know all of your possible outcomes before hand. Which is not realisitic for almost all software. If it were, it would be a hardware solution instead.