I come from humble beginnings. My engineering talent was so elusive to get noticed. I have been challenged to not befit roles that require huge engineering acumen. But, beyond all these, if there is something I have learned in my decade plus engineering experience is just....ABCDE.
Let me tell you why I think so.
1. The Mainframe Myth
I started my career as an engineer for credit card processing software. I saw the complex world of mainframes and people saying this is a niche skill. I spent the next 5 years believing this is the best job in the world. Saw happiness in working with the great networks, brands and the forefront of the wallet and tokenization tech that was making waves.
Cut to the emergence of cloud computing and the company wanted to move to a distributed microservices architecture. I saw it was impossible to adhere to one technology stack for its legacy and niche skill market but the evolving world had evolving requirements ignoring which companies become obsolete themselves.
The "niche skill" was just timing. Nothing more.
2. The Mediocrity That Sells Like Cupcakes
I embraced the Cloud much like my contemporary engineers. But each company I went thereafter I saw something enlightening during the phase of migration. Everyone builds tech in their own ways. Every company had a legacy product which will not conform to better O(n) by design, has non-straightforward development lifecycle, hardest reconciliation of data between nodes. Yet they are selling like cupcakes.
The market does not care as long as they get a transaction response and end of day settlements are made. In essence, these big companies did not have the best engineers build their flagship products. I call them the founding fathers who had a vision and limited tools/skillset at their disposal but won with conviction.
This broke everything I thought I knew about engineering excellence.
3. When Teams Forget Why They Do Things
Once the founding fathers establish a process, they get into the cycle of releases. A machinery that runs and churns output in a loop. People change but the process remains. But a crucial element to note here is that a significant delta just evaporates in these transitions. I call it institutional memory.
Every team at some point goes into a state where they do not really know why they are doing something.
Think about that. Engineers executing processes they don't understand, maintaining systems they can't explain, following patterns because "that's how we've always done it."
4. The Manufactured Complexity Machine
Necessity is the mother of invention. But the need to have churn of effort has become very antithetical to the universal proverbial concept. At some point, there were also teams that brought in forced debt that behind the curtains jeopardized the core psyche of organizations. The books and presentations always showed a positive graph but we know we broke something that was foundational.
We created work for work's sake. Made things complex to justify our existence.
But There is Hope
Stripe is a great example. API First Development felt very customer centric. They didn't overthink it - they just made payments simple for developers.
GitOps has become mainstream. Again, someone looked at deployment complexity and said "what if we just made this declarative?"
I would debate if there is real benefit in using the Cloud and Kubernetes for most companies, but that's another conversation. The point is - simple solutions win when they solve real problems.
AI Changes Everything
AI is here for all of us to embrace and it is more than a boon that they broke ground in consumer-grade AI first rather than flowing downstream from arms race r&d. Now it is democratized and truly from the bottom of my heart I say, Anybody can do engineering.
A kid with ChatGPT can debug code I couldn't figure out in my early years. They can prototype ideas, understand systems, build solutions. The barriers are gone.
What This Really Means
The era of active engineering isn't about credentials or years of experience or knowing the "right" technologies. It's about:
- Seeing problems clearly
- Having conviction to solve them
- Not getting trapped in institutional memory
- Building things that actually work for people
- Refusing to create complexity for complexity's sake
The founding fathers I watched succeed didn't have the best tools. They had vision. Now everyone has incredible tools. So what's your vision?
The playing field is level. The question isn't whether you can do engineering. The question is whether you will.
Because ABCDE ----> anybody can do engineering. The barriers were always more artificial than real. And now even those artificial barriers are crumbling.
What are you going to build?
The Shift to Active Engineering
It's time to shift from engineering to active engineering. And Active engineering is more about being in the know. Everyone is building someone else's tools. And the more we share about what and how we are doing them matters.
So my dear friends, start engineering and be the evangelist of your work. Nothing ever truly mattered.