Why am I a Software Engineer?
I could talk about how my old dad has always loved tinkering with computers. How he introduced me as a teenager to Modula-2 and Borland Delphi 7 and I thought they were fantastic fun. Wow! For all these years I’ve been playing games and using programmes on the computer and now I can make my own! How I loved breaking through the shiny surface of things and getting a feel for how the innards worked.
I could talk about how I vaguely followed the escalator of education—not something I struggled too much with—and chose to do Computer Science at Warwick University, because I gotta pick something and I kinda like computers. And I seemed to know more about them than my peers (and I wasn’t good enough to get into Oxford!). And at this point, I guess it makes sense to stick with my training right?
I could talk about how I have a family to support, That my wife won’t have an income for at least the next five years. That most of us are given to great anxiety so benefit greatly from being in a stable situation with a good (=> expensive) quality of living. And this job pays pretty darn well compared to other jobs.
I could talk about the intrinsic beauty of software—information—the language of the Universe. That to get gud at code is, in some allegorical way, to sense something of the Divine Mind.
I could talk about my own disposition. How I like to reflect, to ponder, to enword things for myself. How thinky I am. How I like novelty for its own sake. How it sort of kinda fits me tbh.
I could talk about FOSS and how I think it spawns professional cultures that feel consistent with the principle of gleaning. Surely the most basic of all the demands of social justice?
I could talk about how it’s what I’ve always done, why change? Sounds like a lot of bother.
But. I don’t want to say it’s those things.
They’re important parts of the story for sure. The journey.
They’re all previous reasons. Contingent reasons. I’m sure I’ll keep having particular moments where each feels important again.
But, step back, and none of them are—on the whole—why I still do it.
None of them explain why tomorrow I’m going to cram to prepare an engineering talk that I wished I’d prepared for more gradually over the last few weeks.
None of them explain why I’m going to give that talk to a room full of people when I didn’t have to. Entreating my colleagues to improve. Empowering them to become more effective. Try to be better myself. The next project will be better. The next client will be more delighted.
None of them explain why I’m going to spend the next week, and the one after that, and the one after that contending with tedious bug reports, clients, colleagues, code. Constantly wading through failing things with insufficient information. Sensing daily the disappointing disparity between the beauty of an ideal, and the mediocrity of its realisation. The lurch of a dozen ideals never brought to fruition.
Sensing and sharing invisible depressions and anxieties, and softly encouraging them all once more in a constructive direction.
No.
The reason is this:
I want to work a field.
And this one will do just fine thank you very much.
