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Some old-school programmers are unsettled by the rise of deep learning. Gathering data, cleaning it up, training models, and experimenting to find what works? This isn’t software engineering as they knew it. This isn’t the mental carpentry they signed up for. “I got into computer science when I was…

Propelled by these epic feats—clever software, endurance, nutty work hours—the PayPal crew developed a proud sense of having won the gold ring in the meritocracy of Silicon Valley. While most other high-tech firms were collapsing in the dot-com bust of the early ’00s, PayPal was soaring. It success…

Soylent is, in many ways, a perfect metonym of the software engineers’ obsession for efficiency. It’s what you get when that worldview—speed everything up, remove friction everywhere—becomes second nature, a twitch instinct. Each moment of life becomes a target for Taylorization, a world of nails t…

The programmer Bryan Cantrill notes that coders vastly prefer to figure out the cleanest fix for a bug, some solution that will neatly deal with every possible situation the software might face. When they can’t do that—maybe they don’t have the time, or maybe the bug simply defeats them—they’ll rel…

“He was supposed to be working on a database migration,” the manager said, “which required a bunch of pain-in-the-ass stuff up front, some scut work of cleaning up data by hand.” It probably should have taken the coder a half day or so; it was a onetime affair, and once he was done he’d never have …