I wrote this book because I had been going from company to company writing software for newspaper publishing, satellite imaging and banking following a long tenure at the enterprise software powerhouse: Sun Microsystems. During that time I started to realize that something was wrong. I was no longer enthused. I used to wake up in the morning anticipating the challenge of the day; unsure how I would address the problem at hand; and enjoying the tantalizing hint of fear that I would fail to resolve it. That experience has become disconnected from my professional life and I thought that an analysis was warranted. There are plenty of programming jobs out there but there are almost no jobs in software engineering. One may begin as a programmer, typing up code to make machines do our bidding; but, eventually, once coding has become second nature, one will crave to do something truly interesting.

The welder may become a specialized precision welder. The seamstress may become a fashion designer. The carpenter may become a master builder. The programmer may become a senior programmer but there will never be a time when the programmer will be challenged to do what no one else has ever done. The software term architect does not refer to one who applies discipline to the design of structures which have not heretofore been conceived. That doesn’t happen in software. The architect figures out what standard frameworks will be used to build out another standard web application. The industry has abandoned the correction of serious problems. This book examines why that is and how we might explore options which reintroduce engineering as a respectable occupation.