Surviving disillusionment (2020)
One of the things not mentioned here is that doctors are genuine professionals.<p>Software developers, on the other hand, are in this weird limbo where some consider themselves as professionals and others do not. I am using the term &quot;professional&quot; in the wikipedia sense <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Professional" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Professional</a>.<p>Similarly, some organizations treat software engineers as professionals, and other consider them closer to manual labor.<p>The result is there is no shared understanding what it means to be a software engineer. Therefore it&#x27;s quite hard to discuss software engineers as a single body of professionals, as the loose definition of the field means there won&#x27;t be a single definition everyone could fall into.<p>What I read from the article is that the author defines his &quot;professionalism&quot; as &quot;inhabiting the monastery&quot;. That is fair and good, but there is no reason this definition and feeling should be shared with anyone else in the field. This lack of shared definition probably drives a lot of disillusionment.<p>Someone thinks they are entering a monastery, but the next guy is there just to sweep the floors for a living.<p>In monasteries most people are there to search for the higher purpose. But in software industry, &quot;sweeping floors&quot; is the most plausible job description, where no holy insight is expected to be gained.<p>The described disillusionment might not be because the business is pathological (which it may very well) but because the practitioner entered the field with false expectations, imagining perhaps grand technological projects to move humanity forward, but founding themselves in the &quot;sweeping factory&quot;.<p>Another thing that comes to my mind - generally once you&#x27;ve been in the industry for a decade or so you are middle aged, and probably entering your middle age crisis where steretypically people re-evaluate their priorities and life goals. Which, given generally sofware people are not the dumbest people around, means there are lot of displeased people trying to search more meaningful careers, and given their general aptitude in complex tasks, can find lot of other fields (that don&#x27;t need years of complex studioes) where they are quite good as well.