In the software engineering profession, there's a concept called "resumeware". It's software that was made with the engineers involved in the design specifically making choices about technology stacks in order to have marketable experience to put on their resume in order to improve their future job prospects, regardless of whether they're a reasonable choice for the system at hand. You can kind of tell when you're looking at resumeware because it looks like the architects threw in every fashionable programming language, library, framework, and architectural pattern into an incoherent hodgepodge.
You could say this is a cynical take on the employer-employee relationship, and perhaps, taking advantage of one's aura of expertise. And that could be true. There's a balance to be had in any job between giving your employer a good return on your salary and the desire of an at-will employee to increase their transferable skills. I think every employer knows this--in fact the good ones use this as a recruitment advantage.
The flip side of this coin is de-skilling, the centuries old drive by employers to reduce the skill needed to produce a product, as part of the endless push to reduce labor costs. Today generative AI is hailed as the ultimate de-skilling force. Employees across all kinds of industries (including software engineering) are feeling the heat from their bosses to increase their use of GenAI in their everyday work. I think that history shows plainly that the march of capital toward greater efficiency is unstoppable. Smashing looms is not a sustainable defense.
When I look into my crystal ball, I see a "Great Sort" coming to the software industry. Just as the middle class of well...life...continues to shrink, I can see the same thing coming to the skilled profession of the software engineer. The question is: Do you want to be sorted to the bottom or the top? Do you want your work to become more skilled or less skilled?
I really do feel for junior software engineers coming out of college in 2025, the time of your career when you're the least skilled, and trying to find a great job while you're trying to get your foot in the door in the age of GenAI. The least skilled are the most vulnerable.
For those among us fortunate enough to be past our junior years to the "experienced" stage of our careers already, what does the future hold? My personal perspective is that I, as I always have, fully embrace the idea of reducing the tedious aspects of my daily work. Programming can be bloody annoying a lot of the time. Assembly language is not a skill I want to have because C# exists, and it's way less annoying to use. There is no way in hell that I'm going to write code in Notepad with a command-line compiler (like I did in college) when IntelliSense and Visual Studio exist. Remember trying to track down the cause of weird error messages in your program before Stack Overflow existed? I do! And it fucking sucked.
I will never take the stance that I want to stay inefficient. I do not want to do my work in a more tedious, annoying way so that I can bill more hours to do the work. But at the same time, I will not de-skill myself for anyone. My general feeling about the big, scary "AI" future of software engineering is that I'm happy to use any tool that makes my job less annoying. My real skill is in producing great software. I am not attached to the tools that I use to do it today or tomorrow. If a statistical word predictor trained on the entirety of Stack Overflow, and fully integrated into my code editor, saves me having to read endless Stack Overflow posts in dozens of tabs in my web browser to produce the same end result, then bring it on.
My personal rubric for productivity-enhancing tools is this: Is my work getting less annoying or am I getting dumber? I refuse to get dumber. Getting dumber is the feeling of sorting to the bottom. If a statistical word predictor can do my job better than me, then I need to learn to do something harder. I will not try to compete at the level of the tool. I will be sorted up, not down.
Just as any employer has the natural right to decrease their cost to make a product, I retain the right to increase my transferable skills. There's a thin line between increasing productivity and de-skilling. I'm all for increasing productivity, but I will not de-skill myself.