Everybody in India was seemingly learning to be a software engineer in the 2000’s. They were super expensive, made a lot of money and commanded respect. Then the recession hit. Now, software engineers were a dime a dozen and begging for jobs.

Ring a bell?

I remember having mixed feelings when coding bootcamps were springing up everywhere. People were paying thousands to go on a six week bootcamp to learn how to code. I was happy that coding was becoming accessible, but I was not happy that people were picking this career path purely as a way of making money.

The same thing had happened in India - the popularity of software engineering had stemmed from the massive amounts of outsourcing that was happening. It was a lucrative career option. There was no love for the job, no curiosity about learning. It was a job.

Trying to hire a software engineer in 2021/2022 was an absolute nightmare. Salaries were skyrocketing and engineers were rare. Good engineers were rarer. The bootcamps were going hell for leather at this time, and then the layoffs hit. Tens of thousands of jobs lost, along with all the new graduates who entered the market. On top of that, add the promise of A.I being able to write code. It can probably write code as well as some of the bootcamp graduates.

There was a time that the majority of software was written by people who loved the work. It was treated more as a craft and we were all figuring out how to do it better. This craft then got commercialised, industrialised.

The focus is now on productivity, and how quickly we can get code out. The love of the work has been lost. Let A.I have that joyless (thankless) job! I (We?) don’t want it.

I’d rather be the last carpenter who still enjoys the job! What about you?