The way engineers get made is breaking. Nobody is going to fix it.
There has always been an implicit deal in engineering: a firm charges out a junior at a high margin, makes good money on their time, and in exchange that junior learns from the work.
This deal is breaking down.
We’re off-shoring (or best-shoring, or whatever word you want to use) more and more of our engineering thinking. And AI is only going to accelerate things. There are some of you that will say we’ve become overly reliant on complex software in the last 20 years too - I’m not going to disagree with you there.
This isn’t really anyone’s fault. Firms aren’t incentivised to care too deeply about developing engineers. But they still need good engineers who can make decisions and take accountability for them.
The only way anyone has ever built that judgement is by doing the work.
If we start taking the work away from younger engineers in the name of efficiency, how do they become good engineers?
I taught martial arts full time for a few years, and in a gym you can’t just study the movements, you have to put the reps in. Engineering isn’t any different. We just used to get the reps as a by-product of the job, and that’s changing quickly.
So I started building falsewrk: a gym for engineers. Somewhere to put the reps in deliberately rather than hoping the right project and the right supervisor come along.