Somebody sent me a fake O’Reilly cover. I laughed. I laughed some more. And then I started sobbing like a little bitch.

The craft is in the animal

The text is fine. The End of Software Engineering. A practical beginner’s guide to starting a career in plumbing. Learn the essential skills and tools to become a confident plumber. Serviceable. You could have written it.

The boar who has given up is what makes it hilarious, and devastatingly sad.

Real O’Reilly animals stand in profile. They are alert. They are engraved in that nineteenth-century natural-history style that says I am not eligible for a 401(k), but if I was I would be making my max contributions. Basically, they look EMPLOYED.

This boar is on the floor. Legs out, chin down, tail limp. It has given up. It has been defeated. Whoever picked that engraving understood the entire joke instinctively. And I bet they had suffered a layoff as a Software Engineer.

The joke has an element of truth that stings

For like a decade, “learn to code” is what you said to people not lucky enough to have the opportunities you had, the education you had, or the autism.

“Learn plumbing” is that advice we gave everyone coming back around to slap us in the face for the audacity of our arrogance.

That is why it is so ironic. It hits a profession discovering what it sounds like from the other side, and what arrogant assholes we were.

What is actually ending

Something is ending. With Agentic Coding tools the majority of our work has shifted back to the olden days of meticulously planning out Software Definition Diagrams and user acceptance criteria. We now almost entirely skip over the code writing activity and have to spend the other half of that energy we reclaimed on being Software Quality Engineers. (Some of us feel bad for looking down on the amazing engineers that kept such high standards in the pre-AI days. I don’t but some people do probably!)

Engineering is not ending. Engineering is deciding what to build, deciding what not to build, and being accountable when the thing you built meets reality. None of that got automated. There isn’t an agent harness that will sit in an uncomfortable meeting with your customers and feel like an idiot.

What actually ended was a particular business model that a lot of us mistook for the profession: the one where a large number of people were paid, well, to translate a clear specification into working code. That was a real job. It was a good job. And a lot of brilliant software engineers never succeeded in it because they are good at building software but not good at talking to customers. (But that’s another blog post entirely.)

The trades were never the punchline

The other thing worth saying: the joke only works if you think plumbing is beneath you, and it is not. It’s honestly too complicated for me. I always joked that plumbing was a “HARDWARE PROBLEM” and I’m a “SOFTWARE GUY.” Seventy-five percent of the time I don’t know what closes a valve and what opens it (in-line with the pipe is open, intersecting is closed??)

A plumber does exactly what a good engineer does. Reads a system nobody documented. Finds where the pressure is going. Figures out which of the four things that could be wrong is actually wrong, without tearing out the wall. Does it in somebody’s house, at their inconvenience, while they watch. Then stands behind the work, because the work is attached to their name and their license and their town.

That last part is the piece our industry keeps trying to buy its way out of. Accountability that follows you.

Honestly, I think we deserve the paradigm shift in Software Engineering for our own arrogance. Our Hubris. And our privilege. Have the life you deserve.

For what it’s worth, the plumbing pivot has better job security than the cover implies, and you’d still be debugging other people’s leaks. Some things transfer.