I have had the job title "Software Engineer" for 632 days now and it still feels like a lie most of the time.
Either because
- it's prefixed by "graduate"
- I tricked a floundering company in to hiring me between waves of layoffs for obscene amounts of money
- more money than most of the people I worked along side who were far smarter than me
- and who got laid off with me as if we equally deserved it
- I tricked a company into hiring me because they liked my minecraft game (twice)
- software engineers aren't real engineers
- web development isn't even real software engineering
- I couldn't write a compiler if you held me at gun point
- all I do is glue work and waste time
- all I do is build "dashboard for x company to monitor y"
- I don't really understand how half the tools I use work, I just know the buttons I need to press
- when I say "backend" I mean "write db query and write some trivial transformation into JSON"
- when I say "frontend" I mean "tailwind and knowing how react rendering work"
- pipelines are just VendorOps
- I spend all day in baby languages
- all my technical opinions are stolen or surface level
- I feel like I knew more in university even though this is obviously not true
- I just don't have to write C anymore
- nothing I make has an interesting or novel explanation behind it
- when I say "system administration" I mean "apt install nginx and google"
- when I say "open source" I mean "I chuck my worthless repetitive shit under MIT"
- for every ounce of power and efficiency the laptop I write this on has, my code still runs slow because I am so high up the stack I've never had to see the bottom
- all I do is write tomorrow's legacy code
Obviously much of this is silly and wrong and I'm doing better than most of the people I know, but all I ever do is realise how much higher the Dunning-Kruger rollercoaster ride goes.