A little gem from Helen Czerski today:

The key point that I think a lot of engineers still don’t get is that their job is not about making widgets that get plonked on top of the world. This is about changing the shape of things inside a working system (Planet Earth) to shift how it operates. Those widgets become part of that system – it’s like operating on a living human. The engineers of the future mustn’t see their job as creating things external to the world.

Which perfectly matches another post I highlighted earlier this year:

However thoughtful or well intentioned, a developer lives, works and is accustomed to a space where having fun “tinkering” is habit, using the “parts”/patterns already lying around the norm, and making tools/features that are seemingly magical to use in their ease or laziness the aim, but, deep consideration of the system wide design uncommon.

A developer sees themselves more like a young person hacking away at something for fun. This is still held as an ideal. They don’t tend to see themselves as a professional contributor/operator of an important social system with serious responsibilities.

So much nodding here, I’m going to need physical therapy.