A long time ago, great men walked the Earth. Now too, just not so many. Back then these men read books from age 2 and onward and they were curious about the world, and in that process they created things and helped to make it a better place for everyone. Back then you knew your craft and you put it to use and people heard tales of your name. That there is Jonas the speedy, they would say, he can deliver a message faster than any steed. Indeed he could. Nowadays, we just settle for the message getting at there at some point in the month for a few bucks. And so Jonas no longer has the same drive that he once had in the past. He's slowed down in his old age. His prices are lower, and he's considering a career change. We still have glimpses of that presently. We have amazing people at Google doing what most would of thought impossible decades ago. We have Elon Musk, the next Nikola Tesla, trying to power the world off of the sun. And we have lots more people that we don't usually hear about anymore.
Back in the day, software development was difficult. Like, too difficult, to the point where most people would never think to take an online course, for the low low price of $29.99 in order to learn it. Developers didn't have any of the fancy tools that exist today and it's no exaggeration to say that 1's and 0's mattered. And that was an exciting time I'm sure. Throughout the past few decades though, things have slowed down a bit. If you look at a piece of software from 2005 and one from today, not that much has changed. The only thing that has changed is the name of a few new libraries and there's probably more 3rd party code embedded now. Nowadays, ads rule the world and clients want impressions and fancy reporting tools. And we need work for foods and such, so we do it.
It's slowly becoming just another job
Software development is quickly becoming a very popular career choice for many people. As well it should, as everyday we integrate our lives more and more with technology. Everyone has a Twitter account and everyone has mastered the Facebook. So everybody knows HTML nowadays, and more companies are relying on CMS's to handle their heavy workload. This means that they don't have to hire the best and brightest, just someone that can figure things out eventually. We've taken a once important job and turned it into just another cog in the machine it seems. We work on projects that make other people money, and as soon as that money stops coming in, we're let go to find another broken machine.
It seems like the people creating and innovating are the business people with the financial backing who've had this amazing idea and now need to get it out. Who then hire the software developer, who steps in to figure out the CMS, and to install the 3rd party cart. It's almost like an assembly line of code really. We follow other people's standards and we build to those specifications.
We're coding less and less
And by that I mean we're creating less and less. We're changing fonts and logos and making sites milliseconds faster, and we improve security by downloading pre-built tools that someone else who is more creative came up with. We spend the majority of our time looking at other peoples code just so we can modify a few lines and we install full payment systems with the touch of a button. And because someone is paying per hour for the service, I can't complain really. It benefits them to have an already working module set up in 30 minutes, then a fancy and custom solution that will takes weeks to complete.
We're not helping anyone anymore
When we're young, we're taught that we can be great men and woman that help others out. We're taught that we can be doctors and cure diseases, or police officers and save lives, or fire fighters, who actually really do amazing things :/ so kudos to them. And we're taught that we can pave the way in technology and become computer scientists. At least that's what it felt like when I was a kid. You felt like maybe you could grow up and be a part of those fancy flying cars and Mars resorts that we saw in the movies. When I was in high school I was working with kb/s download speeds, and I thought it was amazing. Now we have Gb/s speeds and there's just too many shows on Netflix to worry about work.
I haven't lost hope just yet, like many people that I've worked with. I still want to create and I still want to help. How I'm going to do that I have absolutely no idea. But I work at it everyday after my job. I spend 8 hours in meetings, closing tickets, a/b testing pages and configuring CMS's, and then I spend another 6 hours of my time doing anything but that. I design, and draw, and photograph and I build things. I'm still clinging on to this idea that software development is an amazing tool that can pave the way for the future. And maybe in another 10 years, when this job is obsolete, I'll be the guy with a C compiler that will be called upon to save the world.
Walter Guevara is a software engineer, startup founder and currently teaches programming for a coding bootcamp. He is currently building things that don't yet exist.
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