Honestly, the bigger issue is that most SWEs just aren’t very good. It’s extremely telling that when you spend time in tech forums most people dread system design questions as the harder side of interviewing for senior level SWE roles…
System design, though, is the actual point of SW ENGINEERING. That’s the part that is responsible for creating a foundation of quality to build on.
The other side is that sysadmins have largely become DevOps or SRE roles, which means most folks left as a sysadmin are those that couldn’t hack it in the other roles. In the end, as we grow the number of people in tech, the number of software and systems, and the complexity we experience a regression to the mean across the board.
It’s always been a pet peeve of mine that I can count on my hand the number of SWEs in my ~20yr career that had similar understanding of the system they worked with as their SRE counterparts… but this should be table stakes.
System design, though, is the actual point of SW ENGINEERING. That’s the part that is responsible for creating a foundation of quality to build on.
The other side is that sysadmins have largely become DevOps or SRE roles, which means most folks left as a sysadmin are those that couldn’t hack it in the other roles. In the end, as we grow the number of people in tech, the number of software and systems, and the complexity we experience a regression to the mean across the board.
It’s always been a pet peeve of mine that I can count on my hand the number of SWEs in my ~20yr career that had similar understanding of the system they worked with as their SRE counterparts… but this should be table stakes.