Software Engineer

Software Engineer

I recently stumbled upon Paul Graham’s "Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule" 1 while wandering through a list 2 documented by the redditor r/8483. It’s one of those articles that’s so well-written it makes you stop and rethink everything.

I was really impressed by the writing, and even more by the brilliant thinking behind it. It got me wondering about the similarities between software engineering and the craft of writing. On the surface, they seem identical, both are just your fingers dancing on a keyboard. You’d think being good at one means you'd be good at both.

Haha, nope.

To be a great engineer, you usually have to be comfortable with being... disconnected. You have to be willing to spend days living inside the technical rabbit holes, which doesn't exactly leave much room for the world outside of code. Writing, on the other hand, is about understanding and communicating with people. So, people skills and software engineering skills often live on opposite sides of the brain.

To give you an idea of how disconnected we can get: I still vividly remember the sting when my friends told me how easy it was to spot an "IT student" in a crowd. I was definitely guilty of it—I used to wear flip-flops and sleeping shorts to class! But in the IT world, there’s actually a weird kind of respect for it. We’re like a "beggar’s clan"—the messier the look, the more potent the intellect within. And honestly, that is often the case!

Because our interactions with the human world are so frequently winnowed down, many of us never feel the urge to sharpen our prose or explore the rich, messy domains of the humanities. Especially amidst the relentless pulse of tech’s hustle culture, deviating into non-technical fields often feel like a distraction. It takes a rare, stubborn curiosity to bridge that gap.

I’m writing this mainly to express my awe and appreciation for the software engineers who communicate eloquently in both code and writing. They set a great example of how tech workers can be interesting, likeable, and actually good at connecting.

I realize the same can be said for many researchers and people in different fields, from physics to philosophy. But I have only ever lived within the lines of code, and so it is the poets of the keyboard that I choose to celebrate.

References

Footnotes

  1. Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html ↩

  2. The Amazing Github repo: https://github.com/8483/notes ↩