Software Silverback Gorilla
Updated: May 5, 2025
I have been operating in software engineering and IT roles for roughly 40 years, depending upon how you define the origin of the role. I wrote my first software programs in Basic in the summer of 1981; one of those was a modular math quiz program which became my first code used by the public. Beyond that, I entered a professional role at AT&T in 1987. No matter how you count it I’ve been around long enough to rock irritably on the wraparound porch of my career and shake my cane at you damn whippersnappers.
Over the past 40 years, I’ve written and released code into the public in well over a dozen languages, and been trained in, debugged, and/or maintained code in probably a dozen more. Career-wise I’ve participated in every aspect of the software development lifecycle, from blue sky / green field concept exploration to end-of-life product retirement; I’ve also operated in most management roles in software, including project, program, product, people and operational management. I’ve dug into the legal aspects of software licensing and regulation in a few arenas, including telephony, finance, and healthcare; I’ve worked with hundreds of software programmers and engineers at dozens of companies, across a spectrum from non-profit organizations operating out of a bedroom to multi-national, multi-industry corporate juggernauts.
I’m currently doing operating systems support, provisioning systems management, and operating systems vendor management for a medical device manufacturer.
In the social connection sphere, I’ve been around longer than the Internet has; before the Internet, there were FidoNet and BITNET, and I was active on both of those – and I even did some rudimentary modem connection programming between mainframes before personal home computing was a thing. I’m also older than cellphones, and was involved in programming for cellular telephony in the bad old 1G analog cellular network days… and I remember the time before DNS and network routing, when in order to send an email from point A to point B you had to be able to specify the bangpath across the entire network between the two machines.
In short, I’m old, I’m jaded, I’m cynical… and I’m unimpressed.
Of late, I’ve noticed some deeply troubling gaps in the capabilities or behaviors of younger software engineers in Corporate America.
- They’re being trained to certification tests… not in fundamental concepts, problem deconstruction, and/or critical thinking.
Because of this, they’ve largely become reluctant to fuck around and find out… and in many cases, simply don’t have the skills to.
- They’re actively being discouraged from fucking around and finding out by project managers who don’t know how to effectively plan software projects, and who catagorically refuse to proactively acknowledge and/or manage risk.
- They have been taught to worship the god of CI/CD, and more often than not don’t bother with meticulous testing at any level, because they can always fix bugs tomorrow.
- They operate under the mistaken impression that rapid development cycles engender short-lived product code bases and as a result are completely unequipped and unprepared for the reality that software, once released into the public sphere, generally manages to have a lifespan of at least 10 years… and that there is a LOT of critical software in the world operating today that has been in place for 50 or 60 years.
- and finally, they operate under the impression that they’re the only generation that has ever lived on and in the bleeding edge of a new frontier.
Sweetie, you couldn’t be more mistaken. Social media has been around since the 70’s. It just wasn’t called that back then. The main concepts of AI aren’t new; they’ve been around since the late 50’s. You just have better technology to support them than we ever did.
Technology isn’t an infinite plane of possibilities; it’s a torus with fractal landscape details overlaid upon it. Every dizzyingly new prospect is just a more finely detailed and nuanced take on an already existing problem set.
I’m going to delve into each of these items – and others – in longer, more detailed rants over time… and I’m sure that I’m frequently going to sound like an arrogant, dinosaurish boob at first reading.
I’m okay with that.
…Get off my lawn!
Drop yer $0.02... you know you want to!
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