Before anyone misunderstands me, I have a lot of respect for coding and for people who do it well. Writing clean, maintainable, scalable code is not easy. It takes discipline and craft. That matters.
But knowing a language alone is not the job. A cashier knows how to press buttons. An engineer is supposed to decide which buttons should even exist. That’s a very different responsibility.
If the job was just writing code, many of us would already be replaceable. AI writes decent code in seconds. It doesn’t get tired. It doesn’t complain about Jira tickets. So clearly typing cannot be the core value.
When I look back at the engineers who built banking systems, operating systems, airline reservation platforms, spacecraft software, I don’t think their biggest strength was semicolons. It was systems thinking. Constraints. Trade-offs. Failure planning. Long-term impact.
In real life, engineers are paid to walk into messy rooms. Sales says the system is slow. Ops says the workflow is broken. Finance says the numbers don’t match. Leadership says this should have been done yesterday. And nobody agrees on what the real problem is.
That’s where engineering actually starts. Clarifying the problem. Reducing complexity. Designing for failure before it happens. Thinking a year ahead when everyone else is thinking about this week.
Strong engineers are usually strong coders. But what makes them valuable is how they think before they code.
Maybe I’m wrong. But to me, problem solving is the profession. Coding is one of the most important tools we use to do it. The mechanics are getting automated. The thinking is not.
