The future of software engineering is SRE

Summary

When code gets cheap operational excellence wins. Anyone can build a greenfield demo, but it takes engineering to run a service. You may be wondering: With all the hype about agentic coding, will we even need software engineers anymore? Yes! We'll need more. Writing code was always the easy part of this job. The hard part was keeping your code running for the long time. Software engineering is programming over time. It's about how systems change. Let's take no-code and spreadsheets as an example of the kind of software people say is the future – custom-built, throwaway, built by non-experts to solve specific problems. Joe Schmoe from accounting takes 10 hours to do a thing. He's does this every week and it feels repetitive, mechanical, and boring. Joe could do the work in his sleep. But he can't get engineering resources to build a tool. The engineers are busy building the product. No worries, Joe is a smart dude. With a little Googling, a few no-code tools, and good old spreadsheet macros he builds a tool. Amazing. Joe's tool is a little janky but his 10 hour weekly task now takes 1 hour! 🎉 Sure, he finds a new edge case every every week and there's constant tinkering, but he's having a lot more fun. Time passes, the business changes, accounting rules are in constant flux, and let's never talk about timezones or daylight savings ever again. Joe is sick of this bullshit. All he wanted was to make his job easier and now he's shackled to this stupid system. He can't go on vacation, he can't train anyone else to run this thing successfully, and it never fucking works right. Joe can't remember the last time running his code didn't fill him with dread. He spends hours carefully making sure it all worked. Feynman called this the computer disease. The problem with computers is that you tinker. Automating things is fun! You might forget you don't need to 😆 The part that's not fun is running things. Providing a service. Reliably, at scale, for years on end. A service that pe...