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Software engineers have had a suspiciously good run. For the better part of two decades, the profession offered a combination that was difficult to find elsewhere: high salaries, generous benefits and offices whose interior designers had apparently been briefed to build playgrounds for adults. You didn't necessarily need a degree, rarely needed a suit and, eventually, didn't even need to leave your bedroom. While teachers, nurses and other highly trained professionals continued doing their vital jobs for considerably less money, we were arguing about whether the free office lunch had enough vegan options. We didn't exactly handle our good fortune with discretion. We took on absurd names: rockstars, ninjas and gurus. We built an entire culture around the idea that software was eating the world. Every industry was ripe for disruption, every profession was inefficient and every problem could be solved by putting it behind an app and a monthly subscription. There was always a little irony in hearing people with some of the most comfortable jobs in the economy explain why everybody else's was about to disappear. Now software is supposedly coming for ours. Everyone can code Coding bootcamps promised to democratise software development. For years, the proposition was difficult to resist. Take a few months off, learn a programming language, build an app and emerge into a new economic class with a company MacBook and a salary your previous profession might have required a decade to reach. Software engineering became a promised land that required neither years of university nor professional accreditation to enter. You just needed to learn to code. It was probably unreasonable to expect them not to bring popcorn when it finally came for ours. Except there was an awkward contradiction at the heart of the sales pitch. Software engineers were supposedly paid so well because they possessed scarce and specialised skills, while an entire industry was simultaneously advertising those skills as something almost anyone could acquire in twelve weeks. Coding was valuable enough to transform your life, but easy enough to learn before you had to stow away your winter wardrobe. Amid the wave of tech optimism, the contradiction didn't matter. Tech was growing quickly enough to absorb an extraordinary number of people. The bootcamp era helped cement an idea that survives today: that software engineering is primarily the act of writing code. Learn enough syntax, memorise a few snippets, internalise some jargon and you're more than welcome in the secret society. Alas, the market became less forgiving. Bootcamp graduates discovered that building a book-search application and being entrusted with a production system were not quite the same thing.
The twelve-week programme ended, but for many the promised career never began. The gates to tech had been advertised as wide open; there was still, inconveniently, a gate, with keepers guarding it. Nobody needs to code If bootcamps promised that everyone could become a programmer, no-code offered something even more attractive: nobody needed to become one. The databases became colourful boxes, business logic morphed into unidirectional arrows and websites could be assembled by dragging rectangles around a screen. The objective was no longer to teach the rest of the world the strange rituals of software development, but to remove the software developer from the process altogether. There were valid reasons behind this promise. Engineers had become accidental gatekeepers to an increasingly digital economy. If you had an amazing idea for a product, somebody eventually had to translate it into code and ship it. If marketing wanted to experiment, engineering had to build it. If product wanted a feature, engineering had to estimate it. If designers wanted a button moved two pixels to the left, engineering had the audacity to ask why. Democratising the means of production doesn’t necessarily mean democratising the returns. Crafting software gave engineers leverage well beyond the mechanical keyboard. The skill was scarce, demand was high and companies increasingly depended on it. In Marxist terms, which is obviously where any sensible discussion about developers eventually ends up, software engineers had acquired control over a small but increasingly important means of production. No-code tried to loosen that control, but failed to deliver the seismic change it promised. A bigger shake-up was cooking. Seize the means of production AI isn't being sold merely as the next evolution in software production. Increasingly, it is touted as a liberation from the people who know how to write it. A three-month coding bootcamp is now twelve weeks too long. A deep understanding of programming is superfluous. Hiring a team of opinionated software engineers is a threat to the balance sheet. The revolution is underway. It comes with a monthly subscription, per-seat pricing and token allocations. It has its thought leaders, warriors and propaganda department. No blood is being spilled on the streets, but the transformation is violent nonetheless. The masses are shouting "Expropriate!" and software engineers are feeling threatened. Skills acquired over decades are turning into commodities anyone can claim. Their power within organisations is being dismantled. Their pride in the craft, their achievements and even their passion for it are increasingly recast as arrogance and resistance to progress. Public executions are, thankfully, not part of the manifesto, but the software engineer's character assassination is high on the list. Schadenfreude as a service A serious technological transformation is taking place. Denying its existence or impact would be about as useful as insisting the internet was a fad in 1998. But technology alone doesn't explain the peculiar enthusiasm surroundingthe upheaval in software development. Every profession worries about progress, mechanisation and automation. From factory workers to horse-carriage drivers, the past few centuries are brimming with examples of technologies that disrupted entire industries and livelihoods. The angst around major milestones, such as the Industrial Revolution, also led to unrest, revolts and unprecedented social and political mutations. No matter where you stand on the ideological spectrum, it's hard to deny that one of humanity's biggest struggles has been that between those who have and those who don't, those who exploit and those who are exploited, those who control the means of production and those who are but cogs in the machinery. Unless you've achieved absolute enlightenment and completely detached yourself from material possessions, it's hard to argue that envy or jealousy aren't features of the human experience. From biblical tales to wars, we've always wanted more, especially when someone else has more.
Watching tech workers enjoy salaries and working conditions that seemed wildly disproportionate from the outside didn't go down well with everybody. Study for years, work in an essential profession and commute every morning, only to find yourself earning half as much as someone in their twenties writing code from their kitchen table. No need to harbour a deep hatred of programmers to wonder whether the labour market went haywire. Then there are those who tried to join the party. They learned to code because an industry told them they could, only to be stopped at the door. And plenty never wanted to become programmers at all, but spent twenty years listening to tech explain how software would disrupt their jobs, their industries and occasionally their entire way of life.
There is something satisfyingly symmetrical about watching the disruptors get disrupted. It would be reductive to call that jealousy. It would be equally naive to pretend there isn't a little bit of it in the room. The call is coming from inside the house From inside the office, to be precise. The line dividing the revolutionaries and their "victims" might seem very clear at first. But painting the skirmish as non-techies versus techies is too reductive. Some "techies" have answered the call to arms.