I-am-a-software-engineer-so-i-understand-people

The lights are off; the shutters are down; the room is so dark you can’t tell if it is 1’o Clock in the morning or lunchtime. The only thing giving light to this crowed, smelly room is the bright screen with the a lonely software engineer in front of it. It is his 6th coffee that day (or night?) as he maniacally types his last code lines and he finishes the customers project; all on his own, no one helped him, because he does not like people…​

There is this clinging cliché that software engineers are sitting in this dark room, all alone since they can’t talk to people; they are socially awkward and have a tendency to smell bad. Well, this not how it works, …​ That maybe true for a time, when software was at the beginning to be more and more relevant for modern life commodities like a fridge and the economic growth of whole countries. In modern day software development, we do talk more to people than to computers. It’s harder for the customer to decide, what colour a button should have, than for us to implement said button. We have more trouble to make a coherent decisions inside a team about how an interface should be called, than to actually implement that interface. Or even worse, we spent more time telling the project manager how long something will take, than actually doing it.

The cliché of social incompetent software engineers may hold true for a minority on a bad day, but is by far outdated for most engineers. The job title now includes the ability to engage members of different teams and talk with the customer about the requirements in a professional, people oriented fashion.