Holistic Engineer

TLDR: You might be leaving money on the table. You might be leaving satisfaction on the table. Do not limit yourself. Be an Engineer.

Lots of folks are still thinking about frontend and backend, identifying as a backend guy, or a frontend guy. Even worse, as a Java guy or Ruby on Rails guy.

Huge mistake.

It’s just sad, my friend.

French ingénieur means a person of creative mind, an inventor, someone who designs and then builds, all in one. Latin ingenium means innate quality, natural capacity, talent. Its direct continuation, French engin is a machine, device, a contraption.

A maker of engines.

And yet, so many of us think they’re limited to a technology, a tech stack, a part of a solution.

You can engineer more things than you expect

AI makes engineering soft things easier. Even if you always wrote Java microservices, and thought of yourself as a backend guy, I’ll bet you can use the same ways of thinking to design a logo.

Don’t think it’s just “pretty” or “not pretty”.

Solve it like any technical problem. Research what makes a good logo. Learn the terminology: do you need a symbol? Or a wordmark? A combination mark perhaps? Study SOTA. Design a few variants. Gather feedback from peers. Iterate.

Did only frontend before? Try building a full product. Dive deep into the database, set up observability, plug it into a clanker and make it on-call. Everybody and their mothers are building a code factory these days. Or do some hardware, whatever sparks your interest.

Death of a code monkey

I’ve always told people to stop referring to themselves as coders or programmers. I backed it easily: job ads for Software Engineer just paid better.

So they went on to become Frontend Engineers and Backend Engineers. Better than coder, but still…

Over the last decade, these jobs were replaced by Product Engineers, Platform Engineers, Design Engineers.

Instead of specializing by system layer or technology, we moved to owning a piece of the system end-to-end. We stopped emphasising implementation boundaries.

Modern companies don’t have Testers, they have QA Engineers. I remember offices full of normies just clicking through the app. Now we have folks who get paid as much as these old teams combined coding blackbox tests, stress testing, working with security.

Now we have Forward Deployed Engineers, GTM Engineers.

GTM Engineer is a title for a presales person who builds things, a “builder of automated revenue engines”, even if it’s for the purpose of sending a really nice cold email.

Software ate the world, now AI is eating what’s left and we still need more engineers.

The best job ads nowadays say “Member of Technical Staff”.

Regardless of your title, I implore you, think about the whole thing, holistically.

Even if you’re a specialist, become a T-shaped specialist. You won’t forget everything you’ve ever learned. Your experience stays with you and you can use it to tackle more problems than you’d think. Learn, design, build.

You’ll have more fun. You’ll build better stuff. You’ll probably also make more money.

Be a Holistic Engineer.
Just Engineer.