I love being an engineer

I love being an engineer, I love solving problems, I love building society.

How does an army conquer a country? One field, ditch, or building at a time. The generals may get all the credit, and factories may churn out billions of rounds, but for every little hill someone’s gotta hatch a plan for how to take it.

This is my role, I’m not inventing a new way of war (like Torvalds or Guido) or ordering around divisions (like a middle manager). No, I’m trudging through the mud beside a couple of guys who I didn’t pick, and we’re all just doing our best to solve the next problem ahead of us.

We glue shit together until it’s good enough and we move onto the next problem. Napoleon didn’t conquer Europe, his soldiers did.

And what are we fighting for? Progress. I work for a boring business-to-business observability company, filling an infrastructural niche in the global economy. To provide a simple analogy, we build railroad signalling widgets so that railroad operators know where all their trains are. And yeah, sometimes those railroads are used to transport soldiers and bombs, but mostly our work contributes in a tiny yet critical way to this incredible engine of global wealth generation that our society is building.

Ever since we’ve had civilization engineers have been working hard to solve all the tiny problems you got to figure out before you can solve humanity’s biggest problems like world hunger, travel, or cheap electronics. And I’m carrying that unbroken torch, passed on from one problem-solver to the next.

I feel genuine kinship with the guys who designed the telegraph, railroad, and shipping networks. I don’t feel any kinship with the inventors of those technologies or the guys who hammered the spikes into the rails, but I do feel something for the white-collar guy drawing up plans for how to get over the next creek.

And if that’s all I ever accomplish in my life, I’ll be happy. Just another happy cog in the big machine.