1. The Meaning of “Engineer” Got Diluted
In many organizations, “software engineer” became a title rather than a discipline. Hiring scaled faster than mentorship or rigor. Bootcamps and tech companies alike started prioritizing velocity (shipping features) over engineering principles (designing systems). So the title now covers everyone from true systems thinkers to people copy-pasting Stack Overflow snippets under pressure.
2. Incentives Are Misaligned
Most engineers are evaluated on short-term deliverables — not maintainability, observability, or developer experience. That breeds code that works today but isn’t engineered. Organizations often lack feedback loops where architectural debt impacts the people who introduced it.
3. The Tooling Explosion Created Shallow Understanding
With frameworks abstracting away everything, many engineers never learn what’s under the abstractions — HTTP, memory management, concurrency, or distributed systems fundamentals. Tools like React or Terraform make powerful things trivial, but without understanding the “why,” engineers lose the ability to reason when things break.
4. Leadership Fails to Set Standards
If leadership doesn’t model craftsmanship — code review quality, test strategy, incident retrospectives, architectural clarity — engineers default to whatever’s fastest. Good engineers rot in bad cultures.
5. The Best Engineers Often Hide
Some of the best engineers are invisible: they automate toil, reduce complexity, and make others better. But orgs rarely celebrate those contributions because they don’t have shiny demos.
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