A dev work on some code. It works, great, job done.

An engineer comes to see this work. It hasn’t been thoroughly tested, it only works on the dev computer in his coding environment. There is no documentation. There is no comments in the code. Half the features are missing because the story didn’t talk about them. Installing the “software” is made by hand and only one person knows how to do that. Some libraries are used with various licences, some are outdated, some can’t be maintained, some will download stuff on their own. Performances are shit. I certainly forget a lot of stuff.

Now the engineer will work to solve all these non code problems.

Now the problem is that software companies don’t care about engineers because they have managers. Managers will consider engineers like developers and ask them to work like developers. They will also tell the engineer that his lunacies are too time consuming, which means too expensive, so they will go in the backlog and be forgotten.

Yes I’m disillusioned and depressed about working in software development. It’s not like this everywhere. Some companies have an engineering culture. Especially when they come from older industries, like electronics or car etc. But I haven’t had the chance to work in one for 5 years now.