Look back at your last month and it can feel thin. You wired a queue up to a library. You configured something. You read documentation for two days, wrote ninety lines, and most of those lines were about the awkward case your business has and nobody else does. You did not invent anything. Somewhere, you assume, real engineers are writing real code.
I want to take that quietly apart, because it stops good people from believing they belong here.
Professional software has been assembly for a very long time. The proportions have shifted and the nature of it has not. The operating system, the database, the framework, the parser, the encryption, none of it was ever going to be yours, and the value of your work has never been located in its originality.
It is located in the choosing. Picking one of two libraries is a decision that a company lives with for years, and picking the wrong one costs more than any algorithm you could have written. It is located in understanding the parts well enough to know how they fail, which is rarer than knowing how they work, and is entirely what separates two engineers with identical stacks. It is located in the fit, because every business has rules that no general component has ever heard of, and somebody has to hold those rules and the component in their head at once. And it is located in ownership, which is the unglamorous fact that at three in the morning the thing you assembled is yours.
The tell, if you want one, is what happens when a part breaks. The person who only connected it is lost. The person who chose it deliberately can say what it does under load, where it logs, and what they will do instead.
So judge yourself on the right unit. Not lines typed. Decisions made.
Monday: write down the five choices you made this month, including the ones that felt like nothing at the time. That list is your engineering. It is also, incidentally, what an interview is trying to get at and never asks for directly.
– Asael Shinder
