Code never mattered in the first place

2025-05-05T00:00:00Z

I always thought I really had a strike of luck for choosing tech as a career. Due to the technology boom in the last twenty years, it provided me with a steady source of engaging and well compensated jobs (at least until not so long ago).

Back in the day, computing was regarded as more of a vocational path than anything else. Not artist-level "you're gonna starve if you do this", but certainly more akin to any other office job. It was Common Knowledge™ when I started uni that if you wanted a high-paying job you should do medicine or architecture, and not tech. The dwellers in CS courses were just the stereotypical socially awkward nerds who just felt happier at a LAN-party than at a real one.

The setting I'm describing is specifically in Spain, post dot-com boom (2005-2010), although it was probably similar elsewhere. The tech industry was not very mature in here at that time, but still there was a healthy and growing demand for software engineers: just not at very high rates. Employers were mostly big consultancies (think Deloittle, Accenture, or the most infamous one: Indra), which us rank-and-file devs often called "meatshops" (cárnicas), as the pricing structure for their projects was often based in how many resources (ie, developers) were allocated into them. Companies were interested in people that were simply code-literate enough to translate requirements into working software – but no one really cared about the quality of the code itself. The resulting software was not the best in the world, but companies got their businesses rolling regardless.

If you're reading between the lines you're surely starting to see a similarity to recent times. But let's not digress.

By 2010 we start noticing a shift in the industry, with the arrival of a new kind of player: tech startups. These companies don't get money from clients (at least not while they are small), but from investors. They are trying to emulate the playbook of the successful winners from the post-dot com era: Google, Amazon, Facebook... Which included giving engineers more agency rather than considering them simple code-monkeys. Before you know it, good engineering became a valuable asset, which a company could use to convince investors that it can be the next unicorn that will grow exponentially.

And so, companies and their investors become very conscious about having the best engineering team they can get: they now hire for ninja rockstars using coding challenges, they pay better and better rates, they even offer engineers company stock. Investors are happy to fund fancy open plan offices in certain cities that are considered to be "tech hubs", such as San Francisco or London, despite the high cost of living.

There even comes a point where a company growing their engineering team is perceived as a health signal that they are expecting future growth, fueling higher market valuations or extra investment. On the other hand, slashing your workforce or even keeping their numbers stable would lead to uncomfortable questions and a negative sentiment from the market. Therefore, it's been the incentive of tech companies, whether big or small, to keep growing their engineering workforce, even if they didn't need it.

Then enter generative AI. The big players in this industry are trying to convince everyone that their coding agents can replace or greatly reduce the need of having human software engineers. A single engineer can now orchestrate a fleet of agents that will churn in a day the same amount of tickets a team would do in a whole sprint. A product manager can now get from requirements to production with just a prompt.

That's the sales talk at least. But whether these claims are true or not is irrelevant: the point is that the market sentiment has changed. Now companies don't need to hire engineers to signal growth: they can achieve the same by arguing they are harnessing the power of AI better than their competitors. Right now, firing your engineers and saying you don't need them anymore thanks to AI is a power move.

We engineers tend to look at this trend with skepticism: "surely this will lead to sloppy code!", "businesses will lose their competitive advantage!". But we fail to acknowledge the fact that well engineered software is really not that big of an asset to most companies. Indeed, many businesses are successful despite having very crappy codebases – even companies with huge and expensive tech teams! The reasons so much money was poured into engineering in the last twenty years had more to do with investor and market sentiment than practical needs.

However the bleak picture this paints for us developers, I feel grateful for the good times while they lasted. It looks as if code doesn't matter anymore, but in fact it never mattered in the first place. So I feel lucky that for a few years, there was this glitch in capitalism in which money flowed in our direction for a bit.

New Game Plus

2025-01-29T00:00:00Z

A new year, a new life, a new blog.

Becoming a parent is such a radical change in life. One I couldn't possibly anticipate. Your old self dies, in a way, and you are reborn as a different person. One with different priorities and views of life, with different occupations, even a different body. I use to tell people that to me, becoming a mother feels like a new game plus: your game ends, and you get to relive it (from a passenger seat) from the very beginning, but keeping all your accumulated experience and items.

When you work with technology, the change is particularly disruptive. All of a sudden, you go from spending most of your time typing on a pc to nursing a baby non-stop. You go from reading tutorials and documentation to studying parenting books, in the hopes to try and figure out this unintuitive little creature. From attending tech talks, to doctor checkups, from hanging with other geeks, to joining normie mom groups.

At first, I thought this change would be temporary. Just while the baby is small. Maybe a few months. Turns out, babies take some more time to become less dependent than what is usually advertised. And even when they do grow, older kids still need your care and attention. But that's ok: early childhood is a period to be cherished, and there'll always be time to go back to my old life - I thought to myself.

Except, that's not that easy when your old life was all about technology. The field moves incredibly fast, particularly web development. You blink an eye, and there's not just a handful of new JS frameworks or cloud shenanigans, but there's also a magical genie that writes all the code for us. The more time you spend out of the loop, the more detached you become, and that makes it harder still to come back. A cursed cycle.

It's been several years now, more than I would like to admit. And despite having a ton of experience in the field, I do feel a bit like I'm starting all over from scratch: I have a million new things to learn, and I've lost the familiarity with the technologies I used to work with. And let's not even talk about applying to jobs... Because right now even grown senior devs are shedding manly tears over that. It feels somehow like my career is back to square one.

But I'd like to think it's not. The game indeed has reseted, but I still have with me a wealth of knowledge that took me a lifetime to learn. And this new magical genie, as chaotic as it is, can also become a powerful ally. So it's not really a new game: it's new game plus.

Bardic Inspiration

Code never mattered in the first place

New Game Plus