[purple-leafy]

Wrong. It is tough.

But most jobs are tough - in some way.

Software Engineering is one of the most information-volatile industries in history that I can think of.

You have to aggressively keep pace with potentially, and I’m guessing here, the fastest shifting industry in history in terms of practices and knowledge and improvements.

Not only that, it is constant failure and obstacles - bugs, frameworks, features, platforms, what have you - and constant layers of abstraction. A lot of the time you cannot visualise any outputs.

Software Engineering is a highly skilled industry, and probably the most competitive industry in the world, with a very high rate of uncertainty and layoffs and change. We are working with some of the most complex systems created by man in history.

I don’t think you can make a broad generalisation that we are coddled lol. Software Engineers in the USA in certain population centres earn a large salary, sure, but look overseas and comparatively that is not the case.

Seriously, by what metric is Software Engineering one of the easiest careers? I’d like to hear your viewpoint because I think it’s so off-base that I must be missing something.

It has its definite perks like work from home.

But Software is up there as one of the toughest knowledge-worker industries there is.

There are much tougher careers like anything Electrical Engineering, but by no yardstick is Software easy

[9rx]

> and probably the most competitive industry in the world

It may be fair to say that it wants to work its way towards that as the industry matures, but that hasn't been the case. People have been able to make insane amounts of money in software. You cannot make money in a competitive industry.

[Ferret7446]

Indeed, GP's hypothesis can be trivially challenged by asking "If it's so easy, why isn't everyone doing it?"

[try_the_bass]

I mean, everyone's trying. I've noticed a marked increase in the number of people in software engineering who are there first and foremost for the paycheck. Some of them don't even like writing software!

This doesn't necessarily correlate to skill at writing software, but I've also encountered a higher ratio of poor performers from this growing demographic, as well. The end result is that the median skill level seems to go down over time.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, and seems like it should be expected as the pool of people working in software development grows.

But as time goes on, there are definitely more and more people who are trying (and succeeding!) at doing it.