The Engineer's Lament

The Engineer's Lament

Introduction

Every engineer begins their journey with passion and excitement. We dream of building, creating, solving puzzles that matter. The technical challenges energize us; the elegance of well-crafted solutions fulfills us.

But as years pass, something changes. The bureaucracy grows. Meetings multiply. Documentation outweighs development. And somewhere along the way, that spark—that pure joy of building—begins to dim beneath the weight of corporate machinery.

This poem captures that journey: from wide-eyed optimism to the weary reality that many of us face in the modern tech landscape.

The Engineer's Lament

I walked in young, my heart alight,
With code and dreams that burned so bright.
Each line I wrote, a stroke of art,
Each problem solved, a work of heart.

The world of tech, a boundless sea,
A place where thought and hands ran free.
We built, we shaped, we stood as one,
A future forged with lines hard spun.

The early days—when every project felt like changing the world. When learning was constant and possibilities were endless.

But oh, the climb—how steep it grew,
Each year, more weight, more tasks to do.
More forms to fill, more calls to take,
Less time to build, more rules to break.

The meetings swelled, the memos flew,
Decisions made by those who knew
Not of the toil, nor of the strain;
Just numbers tallied, loss and gain.

As responsibility grows, so do the administrative burdens. The ratio shifts: less making, more managing.

They say we must be agile... lean,
Yet meetings swell where work had been.
A hundred voices, none that hear,
A sea of words, vague and unclear.

We talk of flow, efficiency,
Yet drown in waves of policy.
To save a dime, they waste a day,
And call it growth as spirits fray.

The irony of modern software development—we preach lean processes while bloating calendars. We talk about developer experience while engineers drown in process.

My hands once built, now push reports,
My mind once soared, now twists through courts
Of endless rules that shift like sand;
No steady ground, no guiding hand.

The leaders speak of vision grand,
Yet fail to see what's in their hand.
The minds that built, now dulled by chains,
The dreamers lost, the spark remains.

The quiet tragedy: brilliant technical minds redirected to bureaucratic tasks. Innovation stifled by standardization. Creativity sacrificed for compliance.

So here I stand, a weary ghost,
A coder lost at meetings coast.
The thing I loved now wears me thin,
Yet still, I stay, though worn within.

For in the cracks, the embers glow,
The love remains, though buried low.
And maybe yet, through toil and strain,
The joy of building comes again.

Despite it all, we persist. Because beneath the frustration, that love of creation remains. The hope that we'll find our way back to what matters.

Afterword

I wrote this during a particularly bureaucratic day in my engineering career. It represents not just my experience, but a pattern I've witnessed across the industry—the gradual transformation of technical roles into administrative ones, and the toll it takes on those who entered the field with dreams of building.

Yet there's optimism in the final stanza. For all its challenges, software engineering remains a field of possibility. We find ways to reclaim our craft: through side projects, through mentoring, through refactoring neglected systems. We find pockets of joy in the work that reminds us why we started.

The lament isn't an ending—it's a reminder to fight for what drew us here in the first place.