There’s a long list of shows and movies in which some character brags about “knowing HTML like nobody’s business” or being really quite excellent at SQL.
To a anyone outside the industry, these sentences don’t mean more than “I am a great and scary programmer”. The acronyms blend together to just mean “code”. For everyone whose job involves programming, these are very silly things to brag about.
A script writer can do their best to make sure to make sure the information they display is technically accurate, but it will still fail to be appreciated by a technically proficient audience if it’s not emotionally accurate. The character we’re supposed to believe is cool comes off as pathetic.
So this got me thinking - what is actually cool in software engineering? What can someone brag about that would gain my respect?
I think the answer to this has changed over time. As I get more experienced, I find fewer things impressive. Really, my lack of experience with a subject allows me to find more things impressive.
I don’t know enough about arcane instruction sets. I’d find someone’s knowledge of this impressive. I don’t know enough about information security. I’d find someone’s knowledge of niche XSS attacks impressive.
But that still doesn’t mean these things are impressive. Knowledge isn’t impressive, it’s the application of it. There’s a gulf between “I read a thing” and “I did a thing”.
A lot of Staff+ software engineers at big tech companies do impressive things. They can do any number of things, but it’s usually some accomplishment. They “move big rocks” in some way or another. A senior director does similarly impactful things at a higher level of abstraction.
We rarely handwrite assembly these days. Our tools are powerful enough that the majority of your work for the majority of the people is performed at a higher level of abstraction. You’re leveraging computer science fundamentals under a dress of many programs and frameworks.
But is handwriting assembly impressive? I guess it is in the way that it’s a difficult thing. Maybe needlessly difficult sometimes, like running a marathon.
I find lots of the work by Fabrice Bellard impressive. He has built complex production-ready systems - thought experiments that regularly balloon into useful technology.
The more I think about this, the more it turns into an assessment of my value system. Is hard work impressive? It’s something I value, but the characters trying to come off as impressive in media usually mention how simple it was for them.
There are a few computer science concepts which make up the whole of software engineering. The rest is sociology and dealing with the practical effects of software development. Being good at industry is really a combination of the two.
But talking about how good you are at “aligning verticals” doesn’t sound very sexy. Maybe the coolest you can get is a mathematician.