We Don’t Create Senior Engineers Anymore

There is something I’ve noticed for a while now, though I couldn’t quite put a name to it:

The era of the ‘Senior Software Engineer’ — at least as we know it — is coming to an end.

Because the job is no longer just “engineering” as we know it. Nobody sits down and wonders:

• “Which design pattern fits this problem best?”
• “How can I optimize this to perform better under load?”
• “What’s new in the latest Java release?”
• “What does this new framework actually do?”
• “Why exactly is dependency inversion so important?”…

nobody is genuinely curious about these things anymore. Or more accurately, (for the most part) they don’t have to be.

I used to write a lot. I’d research endlessly. I always felt like I had to know things.

Then ChatGPT released.

And at some point, I realized:

— when there is a system out there capable of writing things for me, my motivation to write faded away.

But it wasn’t just my enthusiasm for writing that changed; it was my very instinct to learn.