Software

Standing on Surfaces That Move

The software engineering job has moved, seemingly overnight. Working engineers have not been deleted wholesale; the disappearance loudly predicted in recent years simply hasn’t happened. The work itself has moved, though, and the move is measurable. Line-by-line typing of code got cheap. The judgment about what’s worth typing, and whether what’s been typed will hold together at scale, got expensive. In fact the latter was always expensive, but the cheapening of coding itself has made the gap between the two meaningful.