At Heart, Engineers Are Masochists

Just some recent musings, talking a bit of nonsense~~

After a stretch of tormenting AI tools like Cursor and Claude (assistants?), I couldn't help thinking of a meme: a boy in the future who doesn't get wiped out by AI because he once said thank you to ChatGPT. Enslaving AI is bad, and while doing exactly that, I found myself thinking about the tragic fate of being an engineer.

When you really think about it, engineering is still a high-risk profession. A software engineer with no overtime and no meetings only exists in dreams. The occupational injuries come as a combo: carpal tunnel syndrome, hair loss, and lower back or back pain. Just thinking about it, it's nowhere near as rosy as fresh grads imagine.

Sure, compared to a clown on a tightrope, we're not quite that much of a clown, and compared to a chef's kitchen, the server room isn't as hot. Every line of work has its hardships, but with engineers' insane overtime, all the effort feels pretty pointless. Building a product means trial and error, over and over, until you get it right, and repeating that cycle forever is, I think, the nature of an engineer's job.

Lately my friends have also been ranting a lot, complaining about PMs, about the higher-ups sandwiching them in the middle. The one getting yelled at is the engineer, the one taking the blame is the engineer, and the one doing full stack is also the engineer. Just writing that out sounds exhausting. A promising young Junior fresh out of school walks in and is basically the gang's lowest underling who takes the fall, cleaning up the bosses' mistakes with the thinnest toilet paper there is. But that's usually the road senior engineers walked to get where they are.

And as an engineer who's currently a newbie freelancer, I also wonder: can someone who simply loves computers really make it as an engineer in today's society?

Thinking about it deeply, what is the essence of an engineer? Is it a heart that's really good at writing code? That's not how I feel. Back in college I loved writing code. Making something happen by turning a string of code into reality with my own hands was a joy. All I can say is: I used to think I loved writing code.

But after working with AI, my efficiency actually feels worse. That addictive, joyful high of writing code nonstop has been taken away by AI. What it leaves me is the most repetitive part of the job, the part where you have to Debug, and it's left my motivation kind of low.

It makes me wonder: do I actually love writing code?

I think that's a really hard question to answer. Now that AI has replaced almost 80% of my overall coding ability, what's left of me as an engineer? Honestly, I don't know. But what I enjoy more now is the moment a product feature comes together, and the feeling of building a tool in a single late night using abilities I never had before.

So I think engineers are basically masochists. We make our lives feel meaningful by writing a ton of code and doing a ton of stuff. But I guess everyone's like that, haha. With the AI shake-up, the masochism can only shift over to societal and company problems. The quality has definitely gotten worse, but I want to put into words how this year of being hit by AI feels right now, which I suppose is its own display of masochism.

Just a random rant. A useless engineer, signing off with a few words here.