Goodbye to the Hard Parts That Never Mattered

I read Dave Kiss's eulogy for the software engineer and kept coming back to one question.

Shitty regex? Writing another one-off parser for terrible data? Memorizing some weird syntax for no obvious reason? Losing an afternoon to the particular incantation a build system expects before it will do the thing you already understand?

If that is what died, I am not sure it needs a funeral.

Dave's argument is more hopeful than the title suggests. By the end, he opens the casket back up. The skills are still ours. The engineer is still responsible for what ships. Maybe, he writes, we put the wrong name on the headstone.

I agree with most of that. I just do not think we need the headstone at all.

This does not feel like the death of the software engineer to me. It feels like a rebirth.