I too am not a SWE. This confuses a lot of SWEs, recruiters, interviewers, etc.
My domain used to have a name, but that name got changed to something that has the word AI in it. And I don't really identify with that either, although I use parts of that.
Hacker (in the HN sense, obviously) actually captures fairly perfectly how I approach using computers/tech.
Good piece for those with such an identity crisis to re-find the word for it.
He’s a perfectionist idealistic artsy software engineer. Surely some 10x engineers can find some roles where they can totally avoid agentic AI coding and leave that to their coworkers to manage for him.
We need people like him.
We also need pragmatic efficient generalist software engineers who have a get shit done / FAFO mindset, accept the probabilistic nature of this enterprise and focus on what customers really need
(Hint: your customers don’t care about your beautiful TDD OOP SOLID DRY code)
I love it! I had this convo with many people before, I consider myself a hacker too, not the Hollywood cliche, but the concept of hacking things and repurposing them to do another goal or a new one. I get bored quickly doing the same thing over and over so sitting and writing code is a soul crushing task, rather, I have a goal to do something and in the process I learn all the new exciting stuff while building it, of course, you have to be a quick learn and adaptable to do that. It’s perfect except when it comes to get a job, most companies still follow the traditional concept of you being a cog in a machine, and whatever you are doing will be used in our work, they don’t look at the attributes you have but rather how many X years in writing Z language or FPGA design.
This is perfect!
I too am not a SWE. This confuses a lot of SWEs, recruiters, interviewers, etc.
My domain used to have a name, but that name got changed to something that has the word AI in it. And I don't really identify with that either, although I use parts of that.
Hacker (in the HN sense, obviously) actually captures fairly perfectly how I approach using computers/tech.
Good piece for those with such an identity crisis to re-find the word for it.
He’s a perfectionist idealistic artsy software engineer. Surely some 10x engineers can find some roles where they can totally avoid agentic AI coding and leave that to their coworkers to manage for him.
We need people like him.
We also need pragmatic efficient generalist software engineers who have a get shit done / FAFO mindset, accept the probabilistic nature of this enterprise and focus on what customers really need
(Hint: your customers don’t care about your beautiful TDD OOP SOLID DRY code)
I love it! I had this convo with many people before, I consider myself a hacker too, not the Hollywood cliche, but the concept of hacking things and repurposing them to do another goal or a new one. I get bored quickly doing the same thing over and over so sitting and writing code is a soul crushing task, rather, I have a goal to do something and in the process I learn all the new exciting stuff while building it, of course, you have to be a quick learn and adaptable to do that. It’s perfect except when it comes to get a job, most companies still follow the traditional concept of you being a cog in a machine, and whatever you are doing will be used in our work, they don’t look at the attributes you have but rather how many X years in writing Z language or FPGA design.