Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

Wow, that's a very arbitrary practice: do you remember roughly when was that?

I was in a team in 2006 where we did the regular, 2-approve-code-reviews-per-change-proposal (along with fully integrated CI/CD, some of it through signed email but not full diffs like Linux patchsets, but only "commands" what branch to merge where).

> Yes. I have lost count of the number of PRs that have come to me where the developer added random blank lines and deleted others from code that was not even in the file they were supposed to be working in.

That’s not a great example of lack of care, of you use code formatters then this can happen very easily and be overlooked in a big change. It’s also really low stakes, I’m frankly concerned that you care so much about this that you’d label a dev careless over it. I’d label someone careless who didn’t test every branch of their code and left a nil pointer error or something, but missing formatter changes seems like a very human mistake for someone who was still careful about the actual code they wrote.

Okay, then software engineers are not engineers.

The whole reliability, etc. to many is not of much priority. Things got an absolutely shitshow and still everyone buys it.

In other words the only outcome will be that people don't have or don't want to have engineers anymore.

Companies are very much not interested in someone who does the above, but at most someone who sells or cosplays these things - if even.

Cause that what creates income. They don't care if they sell crap, they care that they sell it and the cheaper they can produce the better. So money gets poured into marketing not quality.

High quality products are not sought after. And fake quality like putting a computer or a phone in a box like jewelry, even if you throw that very box away the next time you walk by a trash bin. That's what people consider quality these days, even if it's just a waste of resources.

And businesses choose products and services the same way as regular consumers, even when they want the marketing to make them feel good about it in a slightly different way, because marketing to your target audience makes sense. Duh!

People are ready to pay more for having the premium label stamped on to something, pay more to feel good about it, but most of the time are very unwilling to pay for measurable quality, an engineer provides.

It's scary, even with infrastructure the process seems to change, probably also due to corruption, but that's a whole other can of worms.

> communicates tradeoffs across the organization

They may do that. They may be recognized for it. But if the guy next door with the right cosplay says something like "we are professionals, look at how we have been on the market for X years" or "look at our market share" then no matter how far from reality the bullshitting is they'll be getting the money.

At the beginning of the year/end of last year I learned how little expertise, professionalism and engineering are required to be a multi billion NASDAQ stock. For months I thought that it cannot possibly be, that the core product of a such a company displays such a complete lack of expertise in the core area(s). Yet, they somehow managed to convince management to just invest a couple more times of money than the original budget that was already seen as quite the stretch. Of course they promises didn't end being anywhere close to true, and they completely forgot to inform us (our management) about severe limitations.

So if you are good at selling to management which you can be by pocketing consultants recommending you then things will work seemingly no matter what.

> If anything, coding agents are a wake-up call that clarify what engineering profession is really about

I believe what we need to wake up to or come to terms with is that our industry (everything that would go into NASDAQ) is a farce. Coding agents show that. It doesn't matter to create half-assed products if you come to sell them. You are selling your products to people. Doesn't matter if it's some guy at a hot dog stand or a CEO of a big successful company or going from house to house selling the best vacuum cleaner ever. What matters is you making people believe it would be stupid not to take your product.

I work alone, I have considerable amount of unfinished code laying around. Sometimes even multiple instances of a thing. I could see how it would be annoying in a team settings. The cause is not having the thing but how you organize it. Like with LLM slop it is wonderful to be able to scroll over something that shows what the solution might look like.

Getting a big customer to pay for a product that your sales team said could do X, Y, and Z but Y wasn't part of the product and now you need some plausible semblance of Y added so that you can send an invoice. If it doesn't work, that can be addressed later.