We are not engineers, we are creators
Engineer is a job title, not an identity. And now that finishing something costs almost nothing, it no longer has to be worth money
The question going around is what happens to us if there is no such job as software engineer in ten years.
The money part of that is real and I am not waving it away. But that is not what I hear in the way people ask. What I hear is panic about who they would be, and that question has a much better answer.
That was never your identity
Engineer is what the market decided to call the thing I do. It arrived about fifteen years after I started doing it. Somebody chose the word, somebody else priced it, and the same people can rename it next quarter.
A title describes an arrangement between you and an employer. Treating it as a description of a person is a category error, and an easy one, because the title is what strangers ask you at parties and it is printed on the card.
If a company can take your identity away by reorganising, it was never your identity. It was their label.
If losing it would dissolve you, the problem started well before any of this.
What is actually underneath
Strip the title away and describe what you were doing before anyone paid you.
I wanted to make something exist that did not exist an hour ago. That is the whole thing. The screen was incidental.
That impulse is not a software trait and it is not rare. It shows up in whatever material is to hand. Somebody writes a poem. Somebody spends a week on one line of lyrics nobody will notice. Somebody paints. Somebody takes a piece of wood and makes a box with a lid that closes properly. Somebody cuts and stitches leather. Somebody writes software.
Those are the same person in different materials.
Software is not what I am. It is the material that happened to be available, and the one that happened to pay.
Born a few centuries earlier I would have made something out of wood, badly at first, and been equally absorbed by it.
What moves between materials
Not technique. Technique is specific and mostly disposable.
What moves is taste, and being bothered by things. The things I have made that anyone liked were not the clever ones. They were the ones where I understood a situation properly, usually because its absence had annoyed me. That annoyance is portable. It works in wood.
The part worth embracing
Here is what I think we are not saying out loud, because we are too busy being worried.
Making things just got much cheaper. Not easier to start, cheaper to finish, which is a different thing and the one that always killed projects. Ideas did not die because they were bad. They died in the boring middle, where the remaining work was weeks long and nobody was paying for it.
That filter was mostly economic. Is this worth the weeks. Will anyone use it. Could it make money eventually. Most of what I wanted to make never cleared it, and I called that being realistic.
The price of finishing something has collapsed, and with it the obligation for that something to be useful.
So make the thing that will never make money. Finish the tool that fixes an annoyance only you have. Write the language nobody will adopt. Build the game your friends play four times and abandon. Finish the box with the lid that closes properly.
Useless is not an insult here. Most of what people have loved making was useless by any commercial measure, and we only call it culture afterwards.
The question stops being whether it can be justified and becomes whether I want it to exist. That is a much better question, and for the first time in my working life I can afford to answer it honestly.
They can have the title. It was theirs to give and theirs to take back. The making was never theirs.