On Coding, Ego and Attention
I get and agree with what the author is saying here, but I also think a big part of this is that in software engineering, so much of what we do is ephemeral. If you&#x27;re a carpenter you&#x27;ll know if you&#x27;re good or not. You&#x27;ll be able to do stuff like frame a house, replace a door, etc. And then when someone asks you how long it will take to frame a house, how much it will cost, what supplies&#x2F;staff you need and so on, you&#x27;ll be able to say.<p>We&#x27;ve been doing CRUD in our industry for decades. How can we not just say &quot;this is how you do CRUD, we&#x27;re done w&#x2F; that now&quot;. We&#x27;ve been doing data serialization for decades now. How can we not just say &quot;this is how you serialize&quot;?<p>There are communities where this is the case. Why have we abandoned them? Why have we abandoned that knowledge and experience to reimplement things in language X or using platform Y?<p>We might not like to hear it, but my guess is it&#x27;s a culture problem. They say the way to get ahead at Google is to build a new successful product. Is that the same thing we&#x27;re doing? It&#x27;s easier to get ahead by building a new Z framework than to become a core committer on X framework from 10 years ago? Are most X frameworks run by toxic communities? Is there something specific about software that means tenured projects become less and less useful&#x2F;maintainable&#x2F;understandable over time?<p>There&#x27;s something in here that&#x27;s specific to SWE. I don&#x27;t know exactly what it is but, I think we should figure it out.